September 28/29/30 2007 East Texas Outing

Click to enlarge On this weekend we were camped in the I.D. Fairchild National Forest, on the first night we tried a couple of locations, one in I.D. Fairchild and one from a remote bridge that crosses the Neches river. We began operations at 22:00hrs in the first location, taking up a position that over looked an open meadow with the river bottoms in the distance beyond that. Using parabolic dishes aimed in variety of directions we setup and broadcasted calls for 2 hours at intervals of 40-45 minutes. We stirred up some distant coyotes but didn't have anything respond that we could not identify at this location. Before moving to our second location we left behind a drop box recorder just in case anything vocalized in the immediate area after we had left. This resulted in some Coyote vocals that were very close to where we had been a couple of hours later. For location two we moved to a remote bridge that crosses the Neches river along the Anderson/Cherokee county border. At this location we recorded some owl vocals and sounds of something moving well back in the woods out of reach of our IR boosted Night Shot Sony camcorders. After several hours at this location we headed back to base camp at 04:00hrs Saturday morning. A dropbox was left at this location as well and was picked up the next day.

During the day on Saturday we split into a couple of teams with one team heading north up river to check on some private property and the other team heading south to check on some areas that we had been in before to see if those still looked viable and to check on some clear cutting operations to see how they had changed the area. We had been in the southern location before in May of 2007 and had some interesting things happen including a nice walkup recording. Both teams returned to base camp at 17:30hrs and after some discussion and a break to eat, it was decided to head to the northern location as it appeared to offer the best possibility for success.

On Saturday night we moved to a large tract of private property in a remote area along the river. On the night of September 29th we had 11 people in the research party, we split into 3 groups with one team stationed on the river to broadcast calls and the other teams taking up positions at various locations east of the river on one of the jeep trails. At approximately 11:30PM the river team encountered a wood knock at close range coming from within the river banks. This team was setup behind a couple of rows of vehicles so did not have a line of sight on the river at the time of the knock. They called on the radio to alert the other teams and proceeded cautiously with camcorders and lights in the direction of the wood knock but were unable to get a visual of the creature responsible in the initial search response. After a couple of minutes a second team was called in to assist in a more thorough search of the area this also resulted in finding nothing regarding the creature itself however some impressions were found in sand that could have been a foot print. Fortunately, one of the parabolic dishes was pointed nearly dead on to the direction of the knock and at a distance of about 25 feet, a close inspection of this recording indicates that something was moving in or came up out of the water about 20 seconds before you hear the knock. Another interesting aspect is that while you can hear something sound to come out of the water before the knock you don't hear this creature make an obvious exit. We speculate that it slipped back into the water and proceeded to swim away, or was hiding in the shadows somewhere along the river bank amongst deadfall and tree roots, etc. When asked later by other team members if the river team heard the water noises they responded that they had been hearing splash noises coming from the river from time to time but paid little attention as it was thought to be fish activity. We exited the property and returned to base camp at 02:30hrs on Sunday morning. The first link below is the original recording from the dish pointing at the knock the second file is a combined file carrying the left channel from the dish that was close and the right channel from a second dish that was near the researchers behind the row of cars. This creates a good stereo effect with headphones, click the links below to listen to this sequence.

This audio contains a wood knock that happened at a distance of about 80ft from our call blast team. The first file is from one of our parabolic dishes that was pointed directly at the source, the second file is a combination file with the left channel pointed directly at the source the right channel taken from a second dish that was recording in the area.

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