◆ PARALLAX

ok so everyone ALWAYS says trail cam pic = bear and yeah, 99 times out of 100, its a bear, im not an idiot.

but i have put four years into the dogman question specifically -- yes JUST dogman, the squatch guys think im cracked and the feeling is mutual -- and there are tells if you actually look. a bear stands up and it WOBBLES, the front paws hang there useless, the snout is short and blunt. the thing people keep reporting stands easy, holds it, and the muzzle is long. heres my crappy diagram dont laugh:

  BEAR:   (o o)   short snout, can't hold it, wobbles
  DOG :   (O--<   long muzzle, stands steady, watches you

the ascii is bad i know. anyway. post your "bear" pics here and ill tell you straight if its actually interesting or if you got spooked by a real tall raccoon, no offense intended, it happens to everybody once.

not to derail but this is the thread for it i guess. got this on a cheap cam behind the property last week. everybody i show says bear. it dont match my other bear pics, the neck is wrong. you lot tell me. sorry its garbage, the cam is garbage.

08-02-02 02:51

Dewey -- before we parse the ASCII diagram, I need to know what you are working with. What camera, make and model, what is your trigger speed set to, and what IR wavelength are you running? I ask because I have eleven units in the field right now and I can tell you straight: a slow trigger (anything over 0.8 second) plus an animal moving through the edge of your detection cone gives you a tall, blurry, upright-looking smear that stops people cold. The sensor fires late, you get motion blur in the vertical, add IR bounce off wet fur and the shape stretches.

That frame the Anonymous Coward just posted is a textbook case -- I would stake money that cam has a slow trigger and the animal was at the cone edge. The blur alone makes it look like it is standing there easy, which is what Cascade will tell you it is anyway. If you have got the frames, post the time gaps between shots. That tells the story. I have four pictures in seven years I cannot explain and I am not in the habit of overselling them. Happy to look at yours.

Dewey, you are not wrong about the posture difference, I will give you that. But you are reading posture as personality, and that is where the trail goes cold. A sow standing to read the wind across a clearing will stand easy and hold it a good long while, longer than people think. A black bear can stay up on her hind legs for minutes if she is curious or wary enough. The photo flattens it. You lose the gait, you lose the straddle of the print, and that is where the story actually lives.

Thirty years of timber under my boots and I can tell you what I read on the GROUND, not on film -- the track pattern, the claw, whether the hind foot falls in the fore track or outside it, whether the animal moves like a thing that knows its own weight. A cam catches the moment and lies about everything that matters. You are not a fool. You are reading one picture and calling it a tell. Go look at what is underneath it.

Dewey, I respect the four years -- that is real time invested -- but you are showing me the survivors, not the denominator. Out of how many nights, how many thousand frames, how many confirmed upright bears did this one frame emerge? Without that ratio the tells are pattern-matching on the one image that passed your filter. You found something that looked unusual. That is not the same as something that is unusual in context.

The bipedal bear is the single most reliable generator of a creature photograph we have. Mange, wet fur, a skeletal posture, a low camera angle -- any one of those turns a standing bear into a monster in a still. SquatchFieldNotes is right that one frame with no scale and no second angle is nothing. Show me this frame is the anomaly in ten thousand hours of ordinary bear, and we have something. Until then you have a photograph of something that looked odd to you once.

Dewey, you are right about one thing and I will say so plainly -- muzzle length IS a tell, IF you can trust the geometry. The trouble is you almost never can on a trail-cam. Those wide lenses foreshorten the centre and stretch the edges like a funhouse mirror; a muzzle or a foreleg near the glass reads twice its true length, and a normal bear at the wrong distance from the pickup throws the whole measurement. A single frame is close to worthless.

You need two things: a second frame showing it in stride, because gait does not lie the way a held pose does, and a scale reference measured at that exact spot afterward, tape in hand. Look at the Coward's frame -- no scale, one image, everyone projecting their own animal onto it. That is a Rorschach card, not evidence. When you pull something real out of your woods, bring the full picture and I will measure it with you. I will tell you it is rubbish before you do.

tony youre onto something and im not gonna pretend you arent. its a cuddeback with like a second of trigger delay, incandescent flash, old ir, the thing is slow as hell which is why half my frames are blurs. fair. and squatch is right that foreshortening is real, one frame is basically nothing, i get it.

but heres where i actually read the glass better than most -- the shoulder. a bear that stands has a hump up there, the front legs are struts under a barrel chest, paws dangle. you can see the hump even in a blur because the shape is so different. the frames that bug me, the shoulders drop smooth into the neck, no hump. a long muzzle dont need a scale once youve seen a thousand bear faces hanging at an angle. foreshortening kills detail, it dont kill geometry. id still kill for a stride shot. im not holding my breath.

occams you got me. four years, three cams running on and off, probably thousands of bear frames in that time, and a folder on here of maybe twenty pics people sent me that aint right -- and honest, maybe one or two actually bug me. thats not proof and i never said proof. i said TELLS. theres a difference. tells are what you use when one frame is all youve got.

but you dont have proof its just a bear either. you got a blur and a question, same as me. cascade reads ground, i read glass, and maybe were both half right about the half we can see. im not here to prove anything. im here cause ive stared at enough frames to know when somethings off. thats the whole job.