Things that go bump in the night
If you’re really curious about what goes “bump in the night,” particularly in Mulmur Township where bear and cougar sightings are rumoured, you need a “Trail Camera,” or critter cam as I call them. Motion-activated weatherproof digital cameras capable of taking daytime as well as infrared night photography, these cameras are best mounted on a tree directed at a known animal trail, thus recording any animals that pass by day or night.
You may remember my “Spirit Bear” articles; well, the good people at the Spirit Bear Lodge deploy 40 trail cameras to track bear movements for scientific purposes. It was there that I got the idea of deploying a 24-hour surveillance critter cam on my own property so I could definitively see what goes bump in my night.
For most people this would be nothing more than feeding a curiosity, but I have long-standing issues with the dark and bears. I know that a fear of the dark is irrational, that there is nothing in a dark forest that isn’t there during the daytime. Sure, under the cloak of darkness whatever is out there might be better able to sneak up on you, but really, day or night is irrelevant – unless at an impressionable age you had a babysitter who told you there were bears in the dark and if you got out of bed one more time they would dismember you. There is no doubt that my brother and I were a tough babysitting assignment, but really a “bears-in-the-dark” story can scar a kid for life. For weeks I remember sleeping upside down with my feet on the pillow – that way should a bear attack, it would go for my head and I could escape out the foot of the bed. It was a sound technique that I fortunately never needed to utilize.
So it was with more than a passing curiosity that I purchased and deployed my critter cam. The first one, a “Primos,” did not work very well. The software was garbage and the service was poor; I would not recommend them. The Spirit Bear Lodge used “Bushnell” cameras with great success, so on their recommendation I purchased a Bushnell and had excellent results. Getting the Bushnell up and running took some trial and error, as there were some nuances and a bit of finesse required. And by the time I finally got it sorted out, critter-cam technology had taken a quantum leap forward. Along came the “UWAY MB500,” an eight-megapixel critter cam with built it GPS and cellular transmitting. Naturally, if you not only want to know what goes bump in the night but you want to know 30 seconds after the bump, this is the baby to have.
The MB500 emails the photo to your computer and texts the photo to your BlackBerry or iPhone immediately, which is pretty neat. Think about it: if or when the cougar walks in front of my critter cam, his or her picture is taken. The incident’s latitude and longitude are registered, the time and temperature are recorded, it’s all digitized and then relayed by radio signal to the nearest cell tower. It’s then sent by microwave to the central phone system, and pulses through the Internet to the email server and finally wirelessly to my earthbound computer. At the same time, a text photo is sent to my Blackberry, regardless of where I am in the world.
Really, this has to be one of the most inane uses of ultra high technology ever, which makes it cool, really cool. I am hoping I can hang in there for another ten years to experience teleportation. I am not counting on time travel, because as Stephen Hawkins so manifestly put it, “if time travel were ever possible we would have been plagued by visitors from the future.”
To date, I have seen squirrels, turkeys, gazillions of raccoons, porcupines, white tail deer, John Deeres, my neighbour on horseback and Jehovah’s Witnesses, but no bears or cougars. Keep in mind though, that despite the Spirit Bear Lodge having 40 critter cams in the field and while having seen several illusive wolverines to date, they have not recorded a single Sasquatch yet. So I am not discouraged – it’s early in the hunt and there’s a real possibility that more interesting things are out there. If the elusive Mulmur Cougar comes by, I will call Brad immediately so the Creemore Echo can get the exclusive story and you will be the second to know.
