The sign

Let’s kick this squirrel blog off with the first story. I was doing some initial tests with the squirrels, the camera and a sign. I had just said goodbye to a friend visiting from Berlin and I had just told him about the squirrel project. The last thing he said to me was “say hello to the squirrels”. I thought it would be fun to extend the greeting to the squirrels. I made the base of the sign out of hazel nuts to make sure that the squirrels would go crazy with the sign. It worked out really well. I have had the camera recording for a while when I looked out on the balcony to catch a squirrel taking off with the sign in it’s mouth.

I watched the recording and noticed that the sign wasn’t that great. It was a bit small and the white background caused the camera to overexpose. I uploaded the video to a test account on Youtube but never never made any effort to spread the clip to the public, I only showed it to a few family members. After 7 views on Youtube I was pretty surprised to receive a comment from a stranger, someone called “Vivyan Fable” (what a suiting name, right?). This Vivyan claimed to have found the sign I had made for the squirrels. I found it both odd and funny and tired to call her bluff by telling her to email me some proof.

Not many days later I got proof in the mail box. Now this was getting interesting. Either this was someone in my neighborhood who was playing me a prank or this was someone with way too much time on her hands that had made a replica of my sign. I started comparing the video footage to the images to see if it really was my sign. It was a very basic sign, black text set in Courier against a white background, very easy to copy. I looked at how the nuts were shaped and how the sign was attached to the toothpicks and decided that this sign was fake.