The Animal Detector

a homemade contraption to record nocturnal animals at home

Now with bubbles!

The light goes on and the bubbles appear when an animal walks by. This curious cat looked up to see where the bubbles were coming from. Here's the setup:

Posted 10:33 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)