The Animal Detector

a homemade contraption to record nocturnal animals at home

Jumpy squirrel

No animals last night, so we left it running through the morning.

10:21am: Jumpy squirrel! The device clicks a moment before the light comes on -- and the squirrel leaps! Here's a composite photo of the leap and a short video.

Posted 11:04 PM

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How this started:
Our 4-year old son left a piece of cheese outside in hopes of finding a nocturnal animal fast asleep next to it in the morning - based on his mistaken understanding that nocturnal animals fall asleep where they stand at the very moment that the sun rises.

The contraption we built:
Then we got ambitious about seeing nocturnal animals. The contraption we devised has three parts:

(1) Bait. Usually cheap cat food, or old fruit, or scraps from the grill.

(2) Computer and webcam, set up inside, pointing out a window. We use a Mac, a high-def webcam, and a motion sensing program to record just when it detects motion in the view.

(3) A cheap security light, set up outside. This was the only part we didn't already have. We wired it up to a cord so we could plug it into a wall outlet. We added a tin can, with both ends cut off, around the detector. This narrowed its range so that only a warm animal at the bait would trigger the light to turn on. The computer records 5 seconds of video when the webcam sees the light go on or off.

Here's what we saw the first time we set it up.

Make your own!
Instructions: here's a pdf file of our article from this issue of Make magazine, and this guy made a 4-minute instructional video.

アニマル探知カメラ

Animal portrait photography & videography that we think is pretty cool:
Dennis Hlynsky
Sanna Kannisto
Nick Brandt
Rob MacInnis
James Mollison
Marina Cano
Vincent J. Musi

(One Gorgeous Cow by Helen Rickard)