June 28/29 2008 East Texas Outing

For this outing 2 of us arrived at our private property access along the Neches River and put out audio recorders and game cameras without camping or staying out all night due to the heat. Driving into the property we noticed that we were the first vehicle to come down that road in some time due to the weed growth in the jeep path. When we pulled into our base camp area and got out of the car we noticed a very clear trackway in the mud along the river bank. We took pictures and made casts of a couple of the tracks and then proceeded to place 5 audio recorders that were food baited along with game cameras to see what we might get. We left the property at 11PM after having extracted the casts, around 2AM a thunderstorm came through the area, we weren't too optimistic that we got much, we arrived the next day around 11AM and proceeded to pick up the recorders, at the second location we found the Dropbox was completely pulled out of the tree, one of the microphones had been pulled out of its socket and was lying on the ground and the bait container that we had left at this location was empty. At the time we didn't know if the storm was responsible or not, the game camera at this location appeared to be having an issue as well as it wasn't taking pictures of us as we walked around looking for the microphone, we chalked that up to the storm and made a note to test this camera before the next outing.

On this night we were using 2 mics with each recorder so that we had stereo sound, we pulled up the file in GoldWave and saw that the left channel had been lost at 3hrs 36 minutes into the recording, which was several hours before the storm. The box was wedged into a tree at a height of over 6 feet off the ground, and was forcefully pulled out of the tree as you will hear in the audio supplied in the left column below. We were using one of the larger plastic boxes at this location, you can see what that looked like on the recorder page. We would generally recommend Olympus voice recorders for anyone wanting to do this type of recording, in this case we were testing a newly purchased Sony Voice recorder model ICD-UX70 to try it out, this unit survived the rough handling and the storm but did less well with the cacophony of night bugs. The recording is kind of murky but you will hear the moment the recorder was pulled from the tree in the link below. In all, whatever this was hung around for at least 15 minutes, it is not known if it also consumed the bait. The bait which was also wedged into the tree near 6 feet off the ground could have been blown out during the storm and small critters could have eaten it.

The tracks we found on the river are only 9 inches in length so are not particularly large, but we think that most humans would not walk in this area without some type of shoe, one of the 2 casts have been turned over to Dr. Jeff Meldrum for further study. There were no shoe prints in attendence with these tracks, they appeared to exit from the woods along the river bank coming from the south and then proceed along the river for a total distance of 60 yards or so and then disappear back into the woods. Dr. Meldrum was pleased that at least the cast that we gave him looks like a foot complete with toes as many that he gets are blobs of plaster.