Recently, a dog that I was involved in the search for was found, by sightings and by a search dog, to be traveling accross a small piece of property that happened to belong to the town. It was outside the fence of the public works building. There was a spot that was perfect for a feeding station, and we strapped one of our cameras to a tree.
The camera was there for close to a week before it disappeared.
Some days afterwards, we were emailed by a neighbor living near where the feeding station was. It seems that someone from the town had gone in search of the camera owner, to tell them they could come pick up their camera from the police department. That neighbor knew how to contact us.
So I called the officer, and I was surprised to have him tell me that he needed me to give him the make and mode, and preferably the serial number, of the camera before he would release it to me.
Well, our group has a number of different cameras, and I didn't have any idea what camera was out there. Fortunately, someone in our group did know which camera was there, and she had its twin at home. She did need that to look up the make and model, and from it she also got the format of the serial number, in case that would help.
So, the lessons are, one, don't forget, as we did in that case, to put identification on a camera (such as strepping a business card on to it, and keep a record of the make, model and serial numbers -- just in case your camera is appropriated by a municipality!
2 comments:
Anyone who would knowlingly remove a camera in a situation like that has too much time on their hands.
Well, that part doesn't surprise me at all. For one thing, a camera like that is valuable, so most people would steal it for that reason. In this case, the town removed it; it was placed (locked to a tree) on their property. It had a flashing red light, and they were perhaps being cautious because conceivably it could be something far less innocent than a camera trained on a pile of dog kibble placed there to see if the dog of interest was eating from the kibble. So, I get the camera being removed, but we should have had identification on it so that the removing party didn't have to do some work to track down the owner of the camera.
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