February 5/6/7/8 2009 East Texas Outing

This outing was the first of 2009, there were 15 researchers present and even this many would prove to be too few to fully cover the 2000 acres of private property we were visiting. The first researchers began arriving on the evening of Thursday, February 5th, the property owner had a deer camp that provided a central location for us to setup our tents. The weather was quite mild with day temps in the low 70's, and lows in the low 50's. We did have some wind out of the south to deal with during the weekend with gusts reaching 30mph during the day and even after dark still reaching 10-15mph. A visual scouting of the area near base camp turned up a couple of teepee structures, one of the teepees yielded a hair, which is included in the photos below. On Friday afternoon at 17:00hrs the crew began the process of deploying game camera's along with baited voice recorders, everything was setup for night operations by 18:30hrs. We deployed 5 different listening teams spread over 3/4 mile, our first broadcast of vocals going out at 22:30hrs. We tried a variety of calls including the Ohio Howl, various whoops and pig squeals, except for some distant coyotes, we did not hear any response vocals while we were in the field this night. In addition, we did a couple of wood knocks and did have at least one faintly recorded reply at 00:30hrs Saturday morning. It was later discovered that we did record a much more audible wood knock on this night that occured before we deployed at 20:40hrs, which you can listen to in the left column below. Interestingly, this wood knock was recorded in an area that was later to be near one of the posted listening teams. This team would withdraw from their position at around 01:00hrs Saturday morning after having seen eye shine and hearing at least one wood knock from their position. The eye shine was captured briefly on their camcorder.

Later in the night, well after the team had returned to base camp, we recorded some howls at 04:24hrs Saturday morning, 9 in all, some of which you can listen to in the links below. We're not sure what it was, it doesn't sound the same as the coyotes that it set off which sound higher pitched and smaller, listen below and decide for yourself. All vocals sounded just like the 3 that we have provided so if this was canid it did not demonstrate the common pitch changes or yodeling that most canids would perform. It also continued vocalizing well after the coyotes had lost interest, the 9 vocals covered a time of about 15 minutes. The recorder that captured these continued to run until after 7AM with no further vocals of this type being found.

During daylight reconnaissance on Saturday a very impressive tree bough was discovered, a young sapling had been pulled down and tucked in behind another tree and is then locked in place via a large pine tree/limb. This can be seen to good effect in the pictures below, it does not appear to be the work of any known fauna in this area and we can't figure how weather would exactly create this type of effect. But hey, if anyone out there can show how weather does this we would be glad to take a look. Again at 17:00hrs, game cams were redeployed to new locations along with baited audio recorders, one of these recorders would reveal that there was something walking around at 20:25hrs near our selected call blast point. We have included some of this activity below, it sounds like it could have been bipedal. For those whom would like to go straight to the best audible walking if you go to part 2 below in the left column and then jump to 5 minutes 30 seconds you can listen to determine for yourself. This is private property and there should only be human bipeds present, all researchers were accounted for at base camp at this time preparing for night operations. For Saturday night we moved to a location that was approxiamately 1/2 mile to the west of our efforts on Friday, we were in place and ready earlier on this night to give us an opportunity to redeploy to a second location if desired in the early morning hours. At 21:30hrs we began with our call broadcasts about 100 yards from where the walking was captured. We started with the Ohio Howl, 13 minutes after this call we did get a response from something, this one could be canid, you can check it out below. If it is a Coyote it was a lone response and very delayed, its possible that in this case it was not responding to us. After this first vocal, we had some reports from the Team located farthest west, and closest to the origin of the response vocal, that they had something moving around them just out of sight in the dark, they were never able to get a visual on it but reported that it sounded like it could have been bipedal. Things were quiet after the first vocal and we packed up and moved to a second location at 00:30hrs Sunday morning. The second location provided no further activity so we returned to base camp at 02:00hrs. We captured over 400 pictures of deer and coons on the game camera's during this weekend but no 8 foot tall hairy creatures.