Mystery Scat

Mystery Scat

Months ago, while doing the lawn, we noticed some (what seemed to be) poop on the top of the large air conditioning compressor unit next to the house.  Weeks later...even more.  We don't have any dogs these days (and no way miniature dachshunds can get up on top of the AC unit!), and the gate is fully enclosed...whatever left this got over our fence from the outside.

These seem the size that a dog could leave, but a dog couldn't get to where these have been left.  A cat could get there, but I don't see a cat producing something this large.  Perhaps a racoon?  A possum? I have seen possums crawling along this very fence before, and I know they are still out and about.  This cute little guy was crawling along the curb this summer:

Maybe his parents left my presents

My idea to get to the bottom of this has been to buy a cheap weatherized game camera. Amazon is full of them: running on batteries, able to see in the night, motion activated, and saving the still images and video to microSD cards seem to be the pretty uniform characteristics.  I bought this camera:

Found at Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07BHLVXF7

I put it on the fence cross post, facing at the AC unit, hoping to catch whatever is coming to leave presents.  This is the view:

Nothing too unusual until 2:42 AM on March 29.  The last frame prior to that was during the day was 6 days earlier, from walking in the yard:

But the next trigger after this:

Is that a head?  Or a tail?  The video recorded just managed to capture the last bit of it still in frame:

The next step: I've ordered some velcro cinch straps off of Amazon.  I'm going to try to use a long one of thoes to lash the camera to one of the fence pickets behind it, preventing some animal's contact from knocking it down.  If I get really desperate (or if whatever it is manages to knock it off even with the velcro), I can screw into the fence to make use of the tripod mount on the underside of the camera.