One of those midnight “I heard such a clatter” events: somebody or something was kicking a can all over the driveway.
Turned out that a raccoon found the stack of carefully rinsed salmon cans in the recycling bin and was puzzling over how to get them apart. Evidently he figured there was something really delicious hidden in there somewhere!
I had time to fiddle with the camera before he gave up and wandered away on his rounds…
These are in near-IR “Nightshot” mode with my ancient DSC-F717 and the 1.7X teleconverter. They’re automagic crops from larger frames, walloped en masse with ImageMagick:
for f in *jpg ; do mogrify -crop 1200x900+700+450 -resize 750x563 $f ; done
The gritty texture plays hell with JPEG compression, but that’s what the camera delivers. An incandescent spotlight on the driveway contributes the deep shadow, but an ordinary camera (my DSC-H5) produced completely black images, even with the high-power flash setting.
Memo to self: start keeping the recycling bin inside the garage. But will that just piss off the bears that are moving (back) into the county?
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
Comments
4 responses to “A Night Visitor”
If you have bears, moving stuff inside is probably a good idea because then there’s at least a chance they won’t bother with the recycling. Once they do find it they’ll come back, and THEN it’s a lost cause.
When my childhood dog kept getting in the trash we started leaving mousetraps with pullstring fireworks attached in the trash. Of course sometimes WE got a bit of a surprise, but it cured the dog. It’s possible that’d work with bears. But I don’t think anything other than firearms work with raccoons — including massive quantities of dcon. They are apparently able to selectively regurgitate it, in my experience.
If you have bears
Some months ago a cub wandered into the bike rental store at this end of the Walkway Over the Hudson in the City of Poughkeepsie, though, so they’re certainly headed this way. He didn’t rent a bike, oddly enough, and got sleepy-darted for his troubles.
We haven’t had any adult sightings within, oh, five miles, but it’s only a matter of time.
I have significant respect for bears’ ingenuity and strength, having watched the one that sometimes lives in my mom’s back yard go hunting through fences and behind/beneath retaining walls for the wild grape vines dad planted. This is a small female, like a very hairy St. Bernard, and she’s still able to move anything that’s between her and what she wants.
The plus side to having a bear semi-resident in the back yard is the mountain lion stays away from mom’s dog. The minus side is having to keep everything extremely tidy unless you want it disassembled and strewn everywhere.
And now I must share one of my all-time favorite quotes:
“There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists.”
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/08/security_is_a_t.html