Group Actions
Engagement
  • Author Author: ralphjy
  • Date Created: Date Created
  • Views 1606 views
  • Likes 18 likes
  • Comments 17 comments
Related
Recommended

Bad Squirrel

ralphjy

It's officially spring and like a good Oregonian, my wife has been planting some seeds to get starts for summer vegetables.  We've finally gotten a stretch of sunny days in the 70s (F) , so she put her seed pots on the front step to get the morning sun.  Yesterday she noticed that the dirt in the pots was disturbed and the seeds were missing.  She suspected that the local squirrels might have done it and I was surprised when she put out new seeds this morning without adding any protection..

 

While we were out walking the granddog (only 5 1/2 miles today), I got an alert from my doorbell camera.  I didn't see anything amiss on my phone, but I checked a full resolution picture when we got home and something caught my eye.  I've marked it in the image below.

image

 

I checked playback around that time on the NVR and it indeed was a squirrel!

 

 

We live in a medium density suburban neighborhood, but we have a fair number of animals because of the numerous greenspaces.  I've had mice, rats, rabbits, raccoons, and a large assortment of squirrels and birds in my yard.  And we've had coyotes and deer roaming the streets.  Last year we had a problem with tomatoes and cucumbers being eaten in our garden and one day we were surprised to see a squirrel eating a cucumber!  Of course we didn't get any photo evidence, so no one believed us.  The only picture I got was of the cucumber, but I didn't have dental records to incriminate the squirrel image.

image

 

My wife is happy that we have video evidence this time.  And it reminded me that I wanted to reprint the mounting plate on the doorbell camera to move the view to the left and down a bit.

  • in reply to beacon_dave

    We have a lot of crows around here and they are a menace, but they mainly go after the trash cans of neighbors who overfill their cans so that the lids don't close image.  The birds tend to operate in packs (flocks?), so you could be in for some fun times...

  • Looks like it heard a dog bark and got scared. You could build a device to detect squirrels and make a barking noise image

  • Ok, it is a bird, yes and it is on a bird feeder, yes...

     

    ...but as of this week it has learnt how to unhook the feeder from the hanger and drop it to the ground so that it can pry open the lid and empty the contents before flying off with the lot.

     

    Set up an old Bushnell 'Trophy Cam' last night to see what was going on and it caught this at around 05:30 in the morning.

    imageimage

    It was probably a bit annoyed by the time of the second shot as the image time stamps showed that it had been there for around 5 - 10minutes trying to figure out how to get around my new tinned copper wire 'security feature'. Wouldn't surprise me if it teams up with the squirrel tomorrow for a more co-ordinated attack.

  • in reply to ralphjy

    The squirrels managed to get into my neighbour's roof space one year and started to chew their way downward through the ceiling. They didn't appear to be too bothered about the cats either.

     

    I had a woodpecker visiting one year - it really put the other birds to shame on the peanut bird feeder. image

     

    The last few years I have had a compost bin full of 'tree bumble bees'. I think some creeping juniper clippings initially attracted them and they have remained ever since. No pots of honey yet on the doorstep though...

  • in reply to ntewinkel

    I don't like cloud subscriptions either and I hate the latency.  I use an NVR and keep all my camera data locally.  The only bad thing about the 8 channel Amcrest NVR that I have is that it exports video in a DAV format which I have to convert to AVI or MP4 anytime I want to use it.

     

    IP cameras used to always have a web API (embedded webserver), but they seem to all be moving away from providing access - especially the manufacturers that are pushing cloud storage.  The key is finding an ONVIF compliant camera so that you can always access the video stream.  Unfortunately, there are varying levels of compliance image.