… yark in the yard?
A few days ago, The Girlfriend pointed out this curious mound of… something… in the grass not 7 meters from the window to Deep 13. Initially, I said, “Bear shit,” based on what appeared to be berry seeds, then looked closer and suspected it was an old patch of fungus that was fading away, but I wasn’t sure of that. Later on, I put on some rubber gloves and checked it in detail.
Those things that look individual, are, and appear that they might be persimmons, though the persimmon tree in the immediate neighborhood isn’t ripe yet. But little to no digestion seems to have occurred, so I’m guessing that these have been regurgitated instead – possibly because a bellyful of unripe persimmons is enough to do that. The cricket, however (near my fingertips,) is a later addition.
I’ve been meaning to get a surveillance camera set up for that side of the house, and had been stalling on it, but this was enough to kick the process back into gear. Unfortunately, the time I tackled it was during the late morning on one of the hottest days, a heat index over 40°c, and I got badly overheated tackling this and one other task, even though I was out far less than an hour – it’s brutal out there. Worse, however, is that the camera system works great, and triggers to record on movement.
“But isn’t that what you want, dipshit?” you ask, and yes, it is – to a degree. I want to see the bears and deer and foxes and owls and whatever else in the fur- or feather-bearing classes that visit. What I do not want to see is the only thing that I’ve found triggering the recorder so far, which is moths – lots and lots of goddamn moths. There will be dozens of clips in the morning, at times spaced only a few minutes apart – I got lucky once and it went for better than thirty minutes without a trigger. The IR illumination bounces back from moths fiercely, producing brilliant white spots against the deep grey of the distant background grasses and trees, and as yet I have not found a way to prevent this.
This equipment is all second-hand, because I tried for a while to get IP cams to play nice with a Linux system but that was a lot of wasted time, disappointing after having such a system running on Windows with surprisingly little trouble. So when someone offered a standalone system with its own harddrive, we jumped on it.
But it’ll be a boon for starting some YouTube channel about supernatural hoohahs, because look at this lovely example of a “rod,” which is… well, I can’t keep track of whatever a rod is supposed to be according to the ancient aliens crowd; it might be a ghost, or an alien, or a multi-dimensional manifestation (which, technically, it is.) In reality though, it’s simply an insect captured at a shutter speed slower than its wingbeat – that sine-wave outer shape is only its wings.
So, if we capture video of something interesting, I’ll make sure to feature it – but don’t be sitting there waiting, because I get frustrated very quickly with going through clip after clip of stuff just like this and find better things to do, so if a bear or a sasquatch is captured, I’m liable to have given up watching before I get to it.