I pulled the card off the wash camera Sunday, or Monday, doesn't matter which, I keep forgetting to write the pull date on the sleeve like I said I'd start doing after the last one. This is card four and I still haven't started the log. Something like a hundred and forty frames, most of it wind moving a branch, and I go through every single one, I don't skip, thats the whole method, skip one and thats the one you needed. The one that stops me is near the end. big dark shape, head down, too close to the lens for anything with legs that long, motion blur on the head like it turned right as the shutter went. record icon in the corner, same red circle my dads old camcorder had, tape used to warp in the heat every summer and he never once replaced the thing. anyway.

Under the shape the unit prints its data strip like they all do. temperature, the record icon, date, time, and a location tag I never set. fifty one degrees. zero five fifty AM, no, five fifty, same thing, I dont know why my hand wants to write it the multimeter way. oh six, oh seven, oh nine. and in the same block capitals as the rest of it: E MARSH.

There is no marsh here. I want that on the record before anybody tells me its a factory default, because I have owned three of these units before this one and I set the label field on all three myself, it does not autopopulate a name it was never given, it asks you, on setup, and I said no every time, I wanted numbers on the strip, not a name. this one has a name I never typed, under a date that isnt this year, same as the cameras with their own clocks never once agreeing with mine, under a temperature that (I checked the actual station archive for that morning, forty four was the recorded low, not fifty one, seven degrees off, not close enough to blame the sensor, and I havent found who else has touched this unit since I mounted it, if anybody, if they even needed to touch it to do that

it wasnt even pointed at anything. thats the part I keep circling back to. pointed at a gap in the brush where nothing walks, I picked that spot on purpose because nothing walks there, that was supposed to be the control, the boring camera, the one I check last.

Card five goes in tomorrow. Different spot.

UPDATE 9/12:

Card five went in where I said it would, different spot, forty yards down the fence line where the ground stays dry enough that nothing normally tracks through it either. That was the actual point of moving it. A second control, backing up the first one, in case the first camera really was just doing something dumb with its own clock and I was assigning it meaning it didnt have. I pulled it this morning. Wind frames mostly. A lot of nothing, which is what a control is supposed to give you. Nothing.

Data strip says E MARSH again. Same four letters, same block capitals, on a unit I have never once wired to the first one, different serial number, I checked the sticker on the housing before I mounted it, Im not that sloppy. Two units. Two locations forty yards apart. Both of them think theyre standing in the same marsh that isnt on the county parcel map, isnt on the flood plain overlay either, I pulled both this week to check. The gap I logged on the street side ran fifty one minutes of nothing recorded where the stamp said there should have been forty, or forty five, I want to say forty, this is the same shape of wrong, a number sitting where a different number belongs and nobody willing to say which one is the lie.

My father used to say a level tells you the truth whether you want it or not. these units arent level, not in that sense, I dont mean the bubble, I mean whatever they think theyre reporting stopped being the ground under them a while back. anyway. Card six is already loaded.

Same fence line, forty yards past card five, further out, past where I think the property line actually sits. I havent had it surveyed. I keep saying I will.