May 6 - 8, 2013 Research Area D Field Notes

  The following information is a general summary of my solo research trip to area D .

   May 6
  I arrived at the research location on the evening of May 6 at around 5:30 PM , the temp was around 72 degrees with calm and clear sunny skies. Moments before reaching the selected area for camp I did a signature whistle that would be used to announce my coming or going. After making note of the above I began to erect my camp and equipment in the few hours of daylight I had left. 

After everything was set I walked around the area near camp to see if any wildlife had been through the area, I soon found raccoon, goose, deer and bobcat tracks all around the perimeter.

  At around 10:00 PM I noticed that the temp had dropped down to about 50 degrees, several quiet hours past and the temp dropped even farther to a chilly 31 degrees, I sat in my darkened camp for a while talking softly about my day to any observers that may be nearby.   I even tried to make some noise with a harmonic guitar pitch tuner just to see if anything would happen.  After a few minutes I heard a few stick snaps and leaves crunching about 20 yards into the forest on the south side of camp, I sat listening to it for a while and could not determine what was making the noise, so I decided to bed down and the rest of the night was still except for a group of coyotes went off at about 1:00 AM just a few hundred yards from camp.

   May 7
  I woke up at around 7:30 AM to see the sun peaking through the trees, the air was still and cold at 31 degrees and the entire nearby swamp had a thin layer of ice coating the surface. I got up, got my gear ready and I was off hiking by 8:00 AM. 

  I had decided to follow a game trail that followed the edge of a forest transition from hardwood to thick spruce forest looking for tracks or breaks. I walked along and bumped up several deer and grouse along the way and even found a old set of bear tracks in the damp earth. 

  I continued hiking around for about 4 hours when I came to a natural gas route, I decided to walk south on the route along an old seasonal road. I soon came to a point where the road was flooded over with about 2 feet of water when I noticed a few odd prints under water in the mud, it was clear that the tracks where bipedal in nature. I noticed also that the point where I came across the prints was leaving point of what ever made them, the prints seemed to just turn out away from the road heading into the dense swamp forest. 

 

I thought about trying to follow the prints into the swamp but it was to thick and I would have likely gotten lost so I decided to trace the prints back trail to see if I could get an idea of what this person or thing was doing or where it had came from. 

  As I began to trace the prints I found a few clear prints where the subject crossed dryer ground. The prints on average where 9 inches long, 4 inches wide at the ball of the foot, 3 inches wide at the heel and had an average step length of 16 inches, some of the prints had grown and shrank due the expanding and contracting with the moist substrates in which they where laid. They looked fairly fresh, I would guess about 12 hours old.

  After tracing the tracks farther about 100 or so feet I could tell that the prints had actually come onto the flooded road from the thickest part of the swamp and walked for about 150 feet to the point of where I first discovered the tracks turning back into the swamp.

  I also noticed that they all appeared to be from a single subject who by the look of it was zigzagging and pacing around in the water trying to catch frogs or some other aquatic wildlife. 

  I thought to myself that children do this kind of thing so I do consider human to be a possible origin of this trackway. That being said I can also say that due to the remoteness of the site, early time of year and temperature of the water to be just above 50 degrees that it would be very strange for a human to be marching through a massive swamp to get to this location to wade in 2 feet of icy water only to turn and walk back into the swamp.

  The temp had risen to a boiling 89 degrees at around 3:00 PM  so I took some photos and traced the movements of the subject then decided to head back toward camp. After several more hours of hiking I arrived back at camp and sat in my tent to get out of the sun for some relief.

  As evening settled in I soon began swapping SD cards, batteries and leaving a few apples out for any visitors that may drop in. 

  The sun started to set and the temperature started to drop and settled down to a cool 48 degrees, soon after the frogs started chirping like crazy.  I sat in my chair enjoying the cool air and listening when 2 massive raccoons came to the edge of the forest and watched me at my camp, I snapped a few photos and watched them slip away in the forest. 

  Just after 10:00 PM I did 3 whoops to try and get a response and got no reply so I sat down by my tent and spoke out loud for a few minutes about my day.  I soon felt tired and I decided to call it a night, the rest of the night seemed to pass with no activity.

    May 8
  I slept in until 10:00 AM and emerged from my tent to a nice temperature of 68 degrees with calm sunny skies. I soon realized that I was to leave for home at noon so I packed up camp, did my signature coming or going whistle and walked out to my ride by 12:00 PM.

  NOTE - After later going over the mass of audio from this trip nothing really interesting was captured.

  The above recorded information was collected by Michigan Researcher - Nathaniel York Bronis

 

Research Area D - Site Description

 Last year I began looking at maps and scouting around for a select site to do my most of my research that would fit my needs and requirements. After five months of mapping out wild ground and heading out on scouting trips to locations all over the state, I found an area I was pleased with and this area is now known as research area D. This sites location will remain private to help keep the research results free of contamination.

 Area D in general is fairly flat and wet with the exception of a few raised patches of ground. The area has many different forest types but is mostly comprised of dense spruce and cedar. At some point within a decade the area had small portions logged and is now filling back in with young regrowth.

The forest floor ranges from damp mossy soil to thick pine duff mixed with dead leaves. Swamps are very common and frequently bleed into creeks and streams that lead into patches of farmland that border the area.

 The area is thick with all manner of wildlife aquatic and terrestrial, in the warmer seasons tender foliage, fruits and tubers abound on nearly every piece of ground.

Due to the abundance of food, water and cover this area is considered ideal sasquatch habitat.

 This has been a brief description of research area D by Michigan researcher ,,,Nathaniel York Bronis.

Introduction

  Hello, and welcome to my research blog. I am a bigfoot/sasquatch researcher in Michigan's lower peninsula and I have been taking reports and doing my own field research since my daylight sighting in the summer of 2009. I grew up out in the country where my time was spent on home work, video games and catching critters near the creeks. At the time I thought I had a good understanding of the forest and it's inhabitants, so I became comfortable out in the woods on my own . Bigfoot was nothing more to me than a joke or legend, told to children to keep them close to the campfire; but as a kid I still found the shows on the subject interesting and neat to think about. As I got older I lost interest in monsters and all things regarded as fiction, and being a country kid I got more into the idea of hunting, so I got into the habit of going out scouting in the afternoon to see deer moving in the area . One afternoon I saw the unexpected.

  I was walking on the edge of a tree line near an open field when I noticed that the forest was getting oddly quiet. As I was walking further I looked up ahead to the trail and noticed a black figure moving in the woods towards the trail. I was about a hundred yards away from the figure at this point but the trees where blocking a clear look at it. My first thought was "hey it's my neighbor". At the time we were not good friends, but I was always trying to be nice, attempting to be neighborly. So, I continued on the trail toward the direction of travel to intersect what at the time I thought was my neighbor. As I approached to about a hundred fifty feet away from the figure, I could tell that something was odd. I kept walking to about a hundred twenty five to a hundred feet away. As it cleared the trees and brush I saw that this was not my neighbor! When it cleared the brush I froze in place staring at this large black Sasquatch standing at the edge of the trail. With a dead fawn on its forearm, it was looking at the ground almost like it was looking for something. At the second I realized what I was looking at, it felt like someone grabbed my insides and ripped them down into my pelvis, or that my guts turned to a heavy metal and dropped from their place. This is the only way I can describe this feeling.

  It was not looking at me at all, I am pretty sure it had no idea at this point that I was even there. I watched it look at the trail right in front of it, facing to my right for about five seconds. Then it must have noticed me out the corner of it's eye and it turned it's head slightly almost like it did a double take. It turned it's whole body and stared right at me. The moment our eyes locked I felt sheer fear over run me, I felt like I was about to drop to my knees. We stared for what felt like an hour but it was probably only ten seconds. After eight to ten seconds of staring at each other frozen in place with the same shocked expression, it dropped eye contact and scrunched it's face up like a disgusted old man and tightened it's body up, flexing it's muscles like he was frustrated by getting spotted. Then it just dropped it's arm and released the carcass of the fawn, and in one sweeping step turned away from me. It took several more steps doing a U-turn and went on a new path right next to the path it made that came out to the trail. He walked through this patch of willow brush like it was grass.

  The way it moved was fluid and smooth, like a gliding motion. Each step was so deliberate and decided. After just a few seconds it was out of sight, but I could hear the creatures' walking turn to a faster pace like a fast walk, then to a running. Even though it was gone I was still so afraid that I could not move for several minutes. I just stood there shaking, but after a few minutes I regained my thoughts and was able to move. I immediately bolted for the house. I am sure I have never ran faster than I did on that day, looking over my shoulder the whole way.

  I got back to the house still shook up and told my cousin and my mom to come with me back there. I put five bullets in the mag and one in the chamber of my rifle. I was not planning on hunting it down to shoot it but I sure as heck was not going back there with out some kind of protection just in case it came back. We got back to the spot and I started shaking again and clenching my rifle. We walked over to the area where it came to the trail and I saw that there was almost no trace except for a set of depressions about twelve inches long and six inches wide. Each track was a little over three feet apart, but no damage to the weeds and forest floor. After inspecting the path up to the trail, we looked at the dead fawn. All the meat from the last few ribs down was gone, but from the front legs up it had all of that meat still on it. The hide was peeled from the hind end had been rolled like a sleeping bag up to the front shoulders. The center of the fawn's skull was crushed like someone took a big wide hammer and hit it. It had punched the bone into the brain, but the skin was not punched all the way through, it just had a few gashes in the skin. It later occurred to me that there was a large rock pile less than one hundred yards away, and I now think that this creature had seen the fawn in the area, saw the rock pile, then put two and two together. As for the path it took out, it looked like someone drove a small go cart through the willow brush and just created a tunnel through it crushing everything in its path. We looked for prints but everything was so torn up, we could not find anything but several depressions.

  The bigfoot itself looked very lean, like a pro athlete. Even with the hair you could see every muscle on it's body. The hair over its body was mostly jet black with slight hints of brown tones where the hair was thinner. The hair over most of its head and body was about three to three and half inches long, but the hair at the top of the back and shoulders and on the forearms was about an inch to 2 inches longer. The hair near the top of its hips and mid section was about two to two and a half inches. It was definitely a male, about six foot three to six foot five. It's body was like a large lean body builder with a V taper from the upper body down to the waist. The arms where long and down to it knees, the legs looked super powerful and the upper thigh was a little longer than the lower leg . There was something about the hands that I found odd, but I cannot recall in my mind what it was that seemed that way to me and it bothers me that I cannot remember this detail for some reason. The skin color was a deep grey. The head was slightly coned but not much, the face had a heavy brow ridge high and strong cheek bones an had a lot of wrinkles and creases. The nose looked human but a little flatter than a humans' nose and wider. The mouth was wide and the lips where structured like a humans' but thinner. The hair on the head went all the way down to about an inch from the brow ridge and ended in a slit widow's peak. The jaw was strong and thick all the way to the chin, but the chin did not stick out past the lips. The eyes where hard to make out, but when we stared I could tell the eyes where large and appeared rather dark, but this could be from the shadow cast by the brow ridge so I could not see whites.

  For about three months I did not go out to the woods, and for several more weeks I did not go outside at night if I could help it. I had trouble sleeping for weeks and only got to sleep when I pulled my bed away from the windows to the other wall near the door. As time went on, my fear turned to fascination and so I began reading and learning all I could about them.

  Since then I have spent most of my time and funds on my field research to learn and understand how these amazing creatures live and interact. The main goals of this blog are to make available techniques, research projects and raw data for comparison or for field application. Data is the most important part of researching and understanding any subject, but for the most part seems to have gotten lost in the hype, monster mania and hoaxes now associated with bigfoot. To bring back the scientific approach to bigfoot research we must share and compare data .This blog is about collecting field observations from all aspects of an environment,testing new ideas and techniques in the field and showing the results. Showing data from one point alone does not really further the research as a whole but if other researchers collect and display their data we would then have multiple points to help establish patterns and general habits of the species.

  There will be more to come as warmer weather arrives and field time can be put in, I hope you find this blog to be interesting and helpful as more content is added. Thank you for reading and check back often for updates ,,,Nathaniel Bronis.