We take a break from our regular programming today to free up some space on the hard drive... uhh... I mean to chronicle the wondrous variety of wildlife viewable from a typical random location in rural NZ. A while ago it occurred to me that I was surrounded by an awful lot of different animals, and I could think of a dozen or more of just birds alone off the top of my head - and so without much further calculation I rather naively figured I could probably record 100 animals, all from within the house. Not to be outdone by the world-renown wildlife cameraman Blaž Petrinčič, I embarked on a quest to zoom the shit out of as many as I could. As it happens I struggled to get to 60, even after cheating a bit by using clips from out on the driveway, and some clips recorded at my old house too. I threw in a few other random clips along the way.
Most of this footage is collected over the last few months which has been winter, and if I had the patience to do this for a whole year I no doubt could also have added:
- crickets (thousands of them)
- praying mantis
- shield bug
- monarch butterfly
- white cabbage butterfly
- duck (I actually did get this but must have deleted the file)
- rat
- thrush
Last summer at the old place I also saw a morepork, which was a rare and rather strange experience - it was absolutely dead silent, like watching a video with the sound on mute. Little to no chance of getting that on camera though...