Filming foxshooting through a thermal imager

The second half of this episode of the Shooting Show is a piece I filmed with foxshooter Robert Bucknell and his friend Nigel Fulton - we were trying out some night vision gear, including a thermal imager. I managed to rig up a recorder to the thermal viewer, which gave a unique view of the night's events. Scroll to 11:32 for my bit.

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Foxing Irish style

Filming this one was a real challenge - not just the fact that we were going round on foot in the pitch dark, but busting through a herd of cattle in the dark is a little unnerving! My piece starts at 10 min 44 secs into the show.

It was an exciting night's shooting though, and interesting to see how different laws mean that Irish foxshooters go about things slightly differently to how we do it in England.

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In the Fox Box with Gary Green

Here's my latest film with Gary Green; unusually this one appeared on Fieldsports Channel, as part of their Fieldsports Britain programme. It was a good night, and I was pleased with the way my infra-red filming gear worked. If you were there, the view out across the field was pitch black, but the camera makes it look like broad daylight.

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Shooting in the dark

This foxshooting tale was quite literally filmed in the dark; fortunately I had some powerful IR lamps and an IR camera which makes it all possible - and Robert and Nigel had night vision spotters and riflescopes so they could do their thing without any need for visible light either. But if you'd been driving by at the time and looked straight at us, you'd have seen nothing at all. Spooky.

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Foxshooting with Robert Bucknell

Here's the tale of a recent outing with Robert Bucknell, after some foxes that are taking rather too much interest in a flock of sheep about to lamb. It's the first item in this episode of The Shooting Show, coming just after the intro sequence.

As usual, Robert and Nigel tested my camera skills to the limit - they have shot together for years and seem to read each other's minds. They certainly don't give me much clue what they've seen and what they're about to do next. It's all done in almost complete darkness, and total silence. I'm filming with night vision, which helps but it's hard to see much in the viewfinder.

If you're not careful, the camera is pointing one way when, bang, it's all over and you never saw a thing! Quite a result, then, that I managed to catch both kills on camera - just!

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Gary Green foxing on The Shooting Show

Here's my latest effort on The Shooting Show - Gary Green out after a fox that's been killing chickens on a large free-range poultry farm in Essex. That was a long day's filming, finishing with me getting home after sunrise, but it was worth it to get a really interesting sequence that tells the story from start to finish. Some day I'll have to blog about the technical challenges of filming a wary quarry in pitch blackness without spooking it - not the easiest task!

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Gotcha!

The ProStalk camera nabbed this photo of my night-time visitor last night. There are 9 photos in all, taken in 3 bursts of 3. The info on the card shows that foxy came through twice - once around 8.40pm and then again this morning at around 6.15.

Event 0001 2009/11/25 20:39:06
Event 0002 2009/11/26 06:14:04
Event 0003 2009/11/26 06:15:44

On test: Pro-Stalk trail camera

I've been waiting for an opportunity to test out the £200 Hawke Pro-Stalk camera from Deben - a nifty bit of kit that you set up strapped to a tree, then come back a day later and marvel at the high quality pictures and video it's snapped of any passing wildlife. At least, that's the theory.

Well the opportunity came along today. Long story, but when our local council issued us with slop bins for food waste, they hadn't reckoned on people like me who regularly have to dispose of the inedible bits of assorted pheasants, deer, trout and the like. The answer of course is an environmentally friendly composting scheme, otherwise known as digging a hole at the end of the garden. The foxes seem to think I'm doing this for their benefit, and do their best to dig the juiciest bits up again.

So I thought I'd set up the camera overlooking their latest hole. The instructions seem simple enough. Like any electronic gizmo, you slot in the batteries (4 D-cells), turn it on, then use the menu to set the time, date, etc. You can set up the camera using a combination of slide switches and a menu, to take photos or video, adjust the delay between pictures, and so on.

I've set it with the minimum delay of 1min between triggerings, to take a 90sec video each time it's triggered. During darkness, it should use its built-in infra-red LEDs to film in night vision. The final touch, a scoop of smelly dog food in the bottom of the hole.

Now I just leave it and wait to see what appears on the card...

UPDATE: Well I clearly got something wrong, because this morning the dogfood had gone, but the camera hadn't taken any video. Back to the instructions, which are of limited help because they were translated into English by someone who, er, doesn't exactly count English as their first language. Reading between the lines, though, I see that they're talking about an IR 'flash', rather than 'lamp', which suggests that maybe video isn't an option during darkness. Which could explain why Mr Fox was able to sneak in and eat his meal unrecorded. So tonight I'm setting it to take photos rather than video. And putting another dollop of dogfood down the hole. At this rate I'll be getting an award from the RSPCA for services to foxes!