Finally, we have the video that I kept mentioning and never actually producing, but when you see the length of it, you might understand. I actually had 42 separate video clips set aside just for this compilation, though I don’t think I used all of them. At the same time, I started cataloging all of the video I’ve been shooting into a spreadsheet, so I can find specific clips a lot faster.
So let’s go to the video first – headphones are recommended because of some of the quieter sounds captured:
As I said, there was about a month of observations in there, though not every night, but a couple of really active evenings when I hadn’t bothered to bring down the camcorder convinced me not to forego this anymore. The juveniles have become inordinately bold, as you can see, but we’re fairly certain they’re still not sure that it’s actually human beings doing all this, or that we’re that close – the headlamps (and their terrible vision) may prevent them from realizing this. When the pond had frozen over we’d gone down a couple of times in the day, and the nutrias that had been out made haste for safety across the pond, at one point to my great amusement because a couple of open patches of water existed, but not a complete path back to the woods where their lodge sits (somewhere – I haven’t located it yet.) One adult and one juvenile were there and scampered off, first swimming across the open patch, then scrambling onto the ice to run the rest of the way. The juvenile made it onto the ice without issue, but the fat damn adult had to make several tries because it kept breaking away the edge of the ice and got left far behind its offspring. Even the highly recognizable sound of the corn being distributed failed to halt their escape, but as I said in the video, it would appear that they consider the water “safe,” since they can dive and not many of the things that might prey on them can negotiate it (we don’t have alligators around here, unfortunately – I’d have even more of a blast with those to chase.) While the juveniles can get a fair turn of speed on land, the adults seem only able to manage a fast waddle, so they’re much more vulnerable.
The current status of the night video rig deserves a gander:
I’ve covered the flashlight holder on the underside before, and even the parabolic microphone, but now they’re all mated together onto a monopod, which greatly increases both the stability and the quality of the sound captured. Most especially, the near-eradication of the traffic noise (and most other background noises as well) has made the parabolic mic a worthwhile addition, even if it can’t capture the lower registers very well; this might actually be serving as an inherent low-pass filter.
[Quick notes on all that. Many mics have a low-pass filter that cuts out the lower frequencies, which is where a lot of the background noise actually sits, especially wind and traffic, though the lavalier mic that I have attached to the parabolic dish has no such setting – it might still be built in, since it’s intended for speech capture during interviews and such. Meanwhile, to capture the lower registers well, a parabolic dish needs to be a certain size because the longer wavelengths of those sounds either fail to focus adequately or bypass a smaller dish entirely; I’ve heard that a meter-wide dish is best, but the one I’m using falls way short of that mark (28cm at its widest,) and noticeably dropped out the lower registers in tests. For nature audio, being able to capture a wide range of frequencies is ideal, but a big dish like that would be impossible to manage. The tradeoff here, losing the lower pitches but being this selective over the directional aspect, is one I can live with handily.]
All in all, though, this took hours of work, not counting the time spent capturing the video clips themselves. It did not help that, before I even sat down to do editing, I’d capture more behavior that I wanted to include, and things just kept stretching out in that manner. Still, not just having the ability to capture and edit decent video, but having such readily available subjects, has been a huge leap forward in my efforts. I’d say I really couldn’t ask for more, but I could – more eagles in the area, or the aforementioned gators, for example – but that would just make me a greedy bastard, while my plate is full enough with all of this. And it’s not even spring yet.
Nonetheless, my takeaway right now is, produce videos of fewer clips, more often, and reduce the oppressive projects in that manner. We’ll see how that goes…