A couple years ago, I had a mouse in my lab. I never saw it, but it wrought havoc on my potted plants. I only got to know my mouse by the evidence it left– holes dug through the pots, dirt scattered over the floor, small poops against the moulding.
My first reaction was one of annoyance. The mouse made itself right at home in a pot of dragonfruit cactus that I had grown from a tiny cutting. The mouse was digging tunnels through the pot, making a mess and killing the vines. I wanted it gone, so I went to the hardware store, picked up a hav-a-hart trap, baited it with peanut butter and left it on the floor near the pots.
It didn’t work. I went through a litany of traps and baits, consulted YouTube for help, and tried out some of my own designs. Each morning I came in to find the bait expertly nicked from the trap with the trap unsprung. This mouse was getting the better of me.
My curiosity started to get the better of me — what was this mouse up to? It wasn’t food–I didn’t leave any food around the lab. Sure, it would grudgingly eat the bits of cheese and peanut butter that I used to bait my traps, but it had started coming before there was any food around. As far as I could tell, this animal had just decided, for reasons of its own, that my pot was a nice place to spend time digging.
It slowly dawned on me that I wasn’t going to outsmart or capture this rodent, but I still wanted to know what it was up to. I had an old webcam and laptop lying around, and I set it up to watch where the mouse had been digging in the pot. I found some free software that would record a video whenever it saw a change in the webcam, and would save the resulting video to my computer. I was about to leave for a week-long trip, so I set it up to save videos to a Dropbox folder, so I could see them while I was away. I left the lab that night, hopeful that my labors would give me my first glimpse of my nighttime visitor.
I was on an early morning train out of town when I got my first hit. My computer pinged a notification, and a minute later, a video appeared on my drive. A fuzzy visitor, whiskered and skittish, popped into focus in my pot, hopping out of its hole to the rim of the pot, investigating the new shining camera in its home, then returning back to its industrious digging and searching. As the miles ticked away between us, my little contraption kept our connection going, pinging every so often to announce another glimpse into this life, parallel to my own, connected only by a flowerpot and a camera. Over the next several days, I captured hundreds of videos of the mouse, and was able to edit them together into this super-cut.
This happened years ago, but this funny connection really stuck in my head. The mix of roles in this activity — part investigator, part inventor, part observer/storyteller — proved to be something greater than the sum of the parts. For me, realizing that I could make my own tools to answer my own questions about a wild animal was equal parts power and fascination. Being able to make that connection in real-time–having an direct glimpse into the headquarters of local mouse activity–was just icing on the cake. I wasn’t sure what to call this activity, but I was knew that it was a thing.
This post marks the beginning of a three-week deep dive into making and using my own camera traps to study nature. I’m particularly interested in what makes this tool powerful and what sort of practices on the human side let me push this wildlife investigation activity the farthest. I have in my mind that wildlife investigation shouldn’t be the exclusive domain of scientists and hunters, and I’m thinking particularly about how to distill the essence of this activity and present it in such a way that people with no expertise in wildlife can get a brilliant, powerful window into the natural stories taking place right outside their door.
I plan on posting daily during this period, with updates, thoughts, and footage from my own investigations, and notes on how I’m adapting this wildlife investigation activity into a classroom activity. Stay tuned — there’s lots more to come!