Well, my family and I went camping on my grandpa's land over the Fourth of July; we left Thursday and stayed until Sunday. He owns a pretty large area on top of a 'mountain', so it's fairly isolated from traffic.
Saturday morning, I woke up, got dressed, and hung around outside the tents, waiting for breakfast to be ready. Of course, mom is very rarely fast enough at cooking to satisfy my always-almost-empty stomach, so I went and got a Little Debbie's Apple Danish, and sat on the car to eat it.
As I ate, I thought I heard cheeping, that almost sounded like a little bird. I began to look around to find where the noise was coming from, and my eyes locked on to a little clump of stuff about 35 feet off the ground. There was a yellowish flash, as a bird quickly made an exit from the nest.
I wasn't sure what kind of bird it was (I first thought it could've been more wood thrush sized), so I decided to hang around and see what happened. I waited for what seemed like quite some time, though it was probably only around 10 minutes. Then, there was a flash of red, and I was overjoyed to realize that one of my dreams, that of finding a Scarlet Tanager's nest, had come true!
Dad was also quite excited, but we faced a problem: how were we supposed to get a camera 35-40 feet in the air? The limbs in the surrounding trees were far too weak to support us to climb up, even if we used a rope.
But then dad got started trying to think of a solution, and he remembered a project he was thinking of a few months ago: building camera mounts out of EMT, a metal pipe. We had quite a bit of it in the garage anyways... So home we went, and we spent basically the rest of the day drilling two holes in the ends of each pipe, and welding nuts with bolts into place over the holes, to tighten down the sections.
When we were done, we had 50 or so feet of pipe; 3/4 inch to go inside the 1", to fasten the pieces together with.
We hauled it over to the camp site, and the next morning began to put it together as well as putting together the head. It was built out of a pulley wheel, with a thick metal 90 degree bracket attached to it. It was designed so that we could attach a rope to it and, by pulling it, could point the camera up or down, while the camera was in the air and we were on the ground.
We mounted my 60D and 100mm f2.8L, his 580EX II, and a GoPro Hero 1 just for the stupid of it, and we were almost ready to go.
A clicker cable was attached to the camera to wake it, and ran to the ground via an extension cord; dad had previously wired the ends up so that any extension cord could be plugged in to extend a 2.5mm audio cable (which is what the 60D takes).
The camera was controlled remotely, via two 50 foot Active Repeater USB extensions, and my laptop, running EOS Utility. This way, we could see what was happening, focus, change settings, and dial the camera in on the nest; all from the ground.
With a little teamwork on both our parts (him turning the head and camera, and me watching the monitor and guessing which way it needed to go) we had it dialed in. The camera was about 5-10 feet from the nest, in the tree beside it.
Here are 2 shots from the setup; a thunderstorm forced us to drop it down after just a couple hours. I'm thinking of putting a rain sleeve on a Rebel T2i, and just leaving it, a 100L, and a 430EXII up there.
One thing is for certain: where there's a will, there is always a way.
Enjoy!
-Darin
Scarlet Tanager ©
by D. Vance, on Flickr
Tanager Feeding ©
by D. Vance, on Flickr
Wonderful images.
