N A W A C Hadrian's Wall Project

[1980squatch]

I found this latest Podcast interesting, they discuss a camera trap project they started with some interesting new twists.  They decided to saturate a relatively small area, and most fascinating to me is they disabled the IR on all the units since the suspicion is they can detect that.  Quite a trade off- no night shots!   Also, that means much longer battery life so they can leave them alone for months at a time.

 

http://nawac.podbean.com/

[BobbyO]

Got to say, these NAWAC podcasts are very good, thoroughly enjoy them.

[wiiawiwb]

There is a conflicting question. Sasquatch seem to be nocturnal...so why would we eliminate our best chance of getting a picture? Although I still have two trailcams out in the field ready to take night-time shots, I'm beginning to think the "no-IR-daytime-only" approach has merit.

 

It would allow even further camouflaging of trailcams.  I could cover the IR emitters with bark and make the trailcams nearly impossible to see...even if you knew where they were.

 

There was a guy on YT who taught how to camouflage a trailcam. He was the Yoda of trailcam camo and I learned from his videos. He was interested only in day-time videos and would dare anyone to find his trailcams. I never could find them until pointed out. 

Edited July 26, 2020 by wiiawiwb

[zman1967]

personally I think the creatures will be more nocturnal in areas that have more human activity, but in areas with little human activity they would be out more during the day.  It is difficult to forage for edible plant at night.  Many animals bed down at night so unless you know where there bedding home is that wold be lost opportunity.  Most of the videos that are produced are from the day also.  

[Celtic Raider]

I always wondered why bother going out at night with the obvious visual problems if your aim is to garner evidence. It seems counter productive, if you get more chance of evidence or improve your chances of an encounter at night that is negated by the lack of clarity or lack of quality of images you would be able to obtain, footprints you wouldn't see and so on.

 

If we assume the animals are real then Patty was filmed in broad daylight and again, if we assume the animals are real then there are lots of daylight sightings, photos and videos some of which must then be real. You may have a lower chance of an encounter perhaps but the chances of documenting that encounter would increase several fold.

 

 

 

[wiiawiwb]

The argument not to disable the IR emitters is you're increasing the number of hours to document a picture or video.  Having said that, I'm all for trying new approaches.

 

There was a guy in YT who did a spectacular job camouflaging trailcams.  His videos are where I learned how to to add tree bark.  Sadly, his videos are no longer on YT but were an excellent resource to hide your trailcam. He'd do it inside a tree stump and would cover up the IR emitters which made it nearly impossible to find the trailcam, even though you knew it was there.

 

Maybe it's time to try covering the IR emitters and going day-time only.

[MIB]

5 hours ago, wiiawiwb said:

The argument not to disable the IR emitters is you're increasing the number of hours to document a picture or video.

 

I use my cameras in 3 shot burst mode.   Even with IR flash, a set of batteries and a 32G SD card last about a year in the field unless I do some idiot move like pointing the camera in the direction of a tree that moves a lot.   Might be different with video, but doing it as I do it there's no gain to disabling IR.

 

The reason for the 3 shot bursts is with a single picture, sometimes it is hard to figure out why the camera tripped, but with 3 shots you can usually find what was moving to trip the sensor.   One day I had a puzzle.  I had a camera out in 2nd growth fir forest that had burned away the underbrush but not killed the big trees.  It was pretty open.    The first picture had the apparent tail of something very large in frame but blurry.   It took several looks, and looking at the subsequent pictures, to identify what was happening.    The whole forest was moving, not just one thing.   There was a very heavy wind, probably a down-burst out of clear sky, bending trees up to 18" in diameter.   The "tail" was the end of a piece of fern I'd used to cover the camera waving in front of the lens.  

 

5 hours ago, wiiawiwb said:

Maybe it's time to try covering the IR emitters and going day-time only.

 

That's stage 2 of my approach, more or less: I have 3 PlotWatcher Pro cameras which are daytime only, they don't have a flash nor do they use detection sensors, strictly timed.   I set them up to take 1 pic every 5 seconds.   It assembles each day's pictures into a daily video.    With 8 lithium batteries and a 132G SD card I can go 12-14 weeks.    Using Day6's software I can "race" through each file in a matter of minutes.   Lot of eye strain looking for brief glimpses of something that wasn't there a frame before, but I can do it.  

 

MIB