>Of course you have to figure out how to capture the animal, put the
>equipment on it safely, track it successfully and then retrieve the
>equipment. None of this is done without risk to the subject so its best
>reserved for professionals. Even they kill animals occasionally.
>Domestic pets might make better subjects. I'd love to listen to one of
>our cats out hunting in the barn at night.
>
>Marc
Marc - thanks for the input.
You are very right to point out the need to involve professionals.
Don't worry I'm not about to do anything silly, or potentially injurious
to myself or an animal. I have a very inventive and responsible friend
who raises orphaned roos and another friend who is a bona-fide expert in
kangaroo welfare and I will consult them both before attempting anything.
Good to establish the need for such things on the record for everyone
who might read this thread now and in future.
I wouldn't be involved in an exercise which would cause the roo anything
other than very brief and minor stress. But I believe these roos are
extremely resilient to stress. I've never seen them go into shock or
die of fright like other birds and beasts sometimes do. As long as you
use a roo who has been reared by humans they should be okay with a
little bit of handling. Especially if you use a young one.
But it is probably a long term project to do it properly. You would
really want to get the binaural effect right (ie mic just beneath the
ears). And then the kangaroo ears rotate forward and sideways
constantly. But I can't really see how you could mic IN the ear. So
that change in the aural environment would have to be simulated somehow
in post-processing I guess.
In the mean time I might be interested in making a simulation of sorts:
For the 'audio tour' project I could probably get really good use out of
a roo-pov continuous period of hopping in an environment with a nice
ambience.
The ambience can of course be recorded seperately.
In the meantime perhaps I can simulate the roo-pov sound myself by:
getting my friend to lure the (human oriented) kangaroo along at a
reasonable clip with food
me using a boom mic and running along behind
us both wearing no shoes or perhaps something on our feet to minimise
our own sounds
I have no idea what sort of post-processing you might try and do to make
this convincing.
This is getting a way away from nature-recording as such but could work
really well in my project. The listeners will be walking from sculpture
node to sculpture node in the forest and a different audio track will be
associated with each node. The sound of arrival and departure at each
node (ie the start and end of each track) could be announced with a
kangaroo-pov hopping in and out.
-all credit for this idea to the suggestions from list members which
inspired it. This is a different idea from the "foley-effect/was it
real or was it the soundtrack? roo-hopping off". I think it could be a
goer!
Graham
>Lots of ways this could be done, I suppose. National Geographic's
>critter cam is an example. David Letterman had a monkey he let loose in
>the studio with a lipstick camera attached to its head as the "monkey cam.=
"
>
>The most important thing would be to design a harness that would be safe
>for the animal, offer some protection to the recording or transmitting
>equipment and isolate the microphone enough to avoid rubbing and wind
>noise. Small would be better. An iRiver with one of the microphones made
>for it, perhaps. Zaxcom makes some excellent quite small transmitters.
>Those coupled with a good omni like a Countryman and you would have an
>excellent, if expensive, system. Any system will run out of power fairly
>soon.
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