Backyard Night Fishing
Just stumbled upon the coolest "night-time hobby": Backyard Night Fishing, (BNF for short). BNF consists of bringing up our streaming bird cam at night and resizing the window such that it occupies a minimal amount of screen and yet is still viewable. Then go back to whatever, and from time to time restore the cam window and see if you've got any "hits". (That is, see if you've stumbled upon some creature of the night. See below...)
The fun of Backyard Day Fishing (BDF) is obvious. "How many types of birds did you see today?" But BNF is more sublime. The question becomes more of, "What kind of critter did you see last night?" The possum above is just one example. Here's a raccoon also from prior PM...
Not bad - two strikes within a single evening. But of course, the trick becomes that of actually recording the sightings. At first, I just kept the digital camera at the ready, and that worked out fine, except that should a visitor appear it was a hassle to fire up the camera, focus, steady and shoot. Nope, there had to be a better way. Enter the "NovaBird BNF Monitoring System" or "NBBNFMS" (or better still, the "NB2NFMS" - pronounced "en-bee squared-en-fims"...)
(Yeah, I need help...)
Just a quick wave of the hand, and the green, tripod-mounted, motion-activated NovaBird would come to life and the shot was mine. This is especially handy in a multiple PC/multiple monitor environment!
But there's one more avenue when it comes to optimizing the BNF experience... Introduce some sort of a trigger that entices the NovaBird to fire every few seconds. Behold the "Triggered NovaBird Backyard Night Fishing Monitoring System, or "TNB2NFMS" - pronounced... Oh never mind. The game plan here is to bring up the time.gov ticking clock and use it to regularly photograph whatever was on the screen before it...
(Yeah, I really need help...)
Anywho... This is just one more way you can have a blast with feeders, even if you don't have any... Just tune into ours... Now all we have to do is come up with some sort of BNF rating system. Let's see... five points for a raccoon, five points for a possum, 15 points for a fox, 15 points for coyote, 50 points for an owl, and 100 points for a bigfoot. Just be aware that I'm going to use every Rube Goldberg assembly to play the game. Just like in fishing.
See you by the feeders,
CapeCodAlan
Cornell Ornithology Laboratory: Inside Birding
Cornell Ornithology Laboratory: All About Birding
