Ah, June 8, 2006 - this is the day I’ve been waiting for… for years! I’ve been trying for years at home to see if raccoons (and other larger animals) would be interested in my project, but with no success. I don’t think that they’re not interested, just that we don’t have any around where I normally do the project. This day was the clincher for that test - I took some time off in June so that the family and I could visit relatives, relatives that know that raccoons have been in their area. Seeing the opportunity in the slight chance of seeing something other than I’ve been seeing at home, I asked if I could do my “tapings” there and they gladly agreed - “Oh yeah, you’ll see all kinds of things here. I doubt that you’ll see raccoons though - I haven’t seen any of them in a few months.” Well, even with that, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity! During the week that I took off, I took every one of my cables inside from their usual place (which in itself is a feat), designed a larger “raccoon-friendly” version of my project platform, wrote up pages and pages of logistics on how I would get this to work and then, finally, on June 8th, left for the other house. All along the way, my father told me over and over again not to “expect anything!” Which I understood, but this just seemed like it could work - I don’t know why, but it just seemed right. I agreed with everyone that I wouldn’t do the “project” as it was, and I’d just do a simple “scouting” kind of taping for the first night I was there, where I just let the camera run and see what happens - the house I was visiting has a motion-sensor light, so it just kicks on (or should - read the June 12th entry for a “funny” story about that). Strangely enough, I showed the project platform to everyone and they said “Well, you could try it, but I doubt you’ll get anything. And you still probably won’t get raccoons, maybe a possum or skunk.” Well, I wanted to see a raccoon, but any of those would be a welcome sight! I tried using the platform anyway (without spiking it in the ground - this was just a test) despite the doubt of not getting anything to come, putting a little bit of buttered bread inside the bag, on the top and around the sides to bring whatever might be interested into view. Cables, cables and more cables, finally I had everything wired inside, the camera, sitting on a motorized panhead, sitting on a tripod and everything eventually making it’s way back to an iBook and a FireWire drive. With this setup, I could leave everything running and not need to worry about the camera running out of tape, etc…, and I could (with the panhead control) control the camera while not disturbing what (might) come to the whole setup. With everything set up for the night, and nothing coming at the current time, I decided to rest a little and wait for the light to come on - I still wasn’t sure if the setup would be investigated at all, but I still had that little bit of hope that something would come… Finally, at 1:30am on Friday morning, the light kicked on for the first time - it was — nothing. I ran to the computer thinking “well, maybe something walked by…” Nope. Nothing came - I’m not sure why the light kicked on then. “OK, fine… there’s still time.” Another hour went by, and again the light kicked on at 2:30 - “What is it this time?” I got up from where I was laying and sleepily walked into the kitchen (the house isn’t that large, the window where everything was set up was within walking distance from where I was sleeping) and what should I see but a raccoon standing in the middle of the yard! This is the sight I’ve been waiting to see for the last 10 years, and I was staring right at it! “Yes!!” I ran to the computer again to make sure that it was capturing, and it was! “Yes! My first raccoon! And I’m taping it!” My grandfather got up to see what was going on, and I showed him the raccoon (much to his own surprise from not seeing one for months, and not only that, but with my entire setup going!) and he cheered that I got what I was trying to tape. “Cool, huh?” In a little more than 5 minutes, the raccoon left (this time without really doing anything to the project, it didn’t really notice any food inside of it, but hey, it’s a raccoon, that I recorded, so I really didn’t care at that point!) I tried running another camera for the rest of the night to get a ground-level shot of the raccoon (or anything else that wanted to come), but nothing else came… Not bad though for the first night of a test!! The video of the first raccoon is below - one thing that I didn’t expect (but was also a very interesting thing) was the raccoon’s paw print in the middle of the video. The platform had condensation on it (perhaps from dew) and the raccoon touched part of the bag and didn’t move it’s paw around, so I got a picture of a raccoon’s pawprint! Watch for that in the middle of the video.

NOTE: There are 2 normal sized (360×240 for the High Quality file and 320×240 for the Lower Quality file) as well as one larger XL (480×320) format file with this posting. The normal sized files and the XL file are both shots of the same thing, the raccoon checking things out at my project, but the XL file is slightly larger and takes up a little more bandwith, so if you want to see the higher quality file, be prepared to wait a little longer… Also, because it’s larger, I put a small text bug on the bottom, because I originally encoded this file before this version of my site existed, and I used the file to show off my raccoon to people that wanted to see…

Raccoons and Dim Sum? The “theme music” for this recording, this night, and all of the subsequent raccoon recordings is by a complete random chance a combination of songs known to me only as Dim Sum, a collection of 19 tracks downloaded as samples from ExtremeMusic.com one morning in April while looking for a particular track - if I heard something interesting on the way, it got downloaded - the whole lot of downloaded songs then got the name Dim Sum so I could listen to them as an album (they didn’t have names in the ID3 tags.) I imported the entirety of my music collection on the iBook, but as I was sitting there for another raccoon, I didn’t want to wait the 10 minutes of CPU time I’d need to load all of those songs (around 2,800 or so) and just sat listening to what was already on iTunes, a few tracks here and there and in the middle, all of the Dim Sum selection…

The most noteworthy songs from Dim Sum for this trip were “Monstermania”, track 1, from XCD042, “Naked”, track 10 (which fits perfectly with the theme of sitting in somewhat complete darkness, waiting for the light to kick on again), also from XCD042 and “Ab-Synth”, track 9, sample from XCD052 - they’re not easy to find (they’re not available at all as purchaseable music), but if you know where they come from, you can still hear them - they’re the music I was listening to while waiting for something else to come on the first night, and listened to countless times while waiting for other things on all of the other nights, so they’re the “theme” to the whole trip.

 

 6-8-06 Raccoon!! (Demo) [0:31m]: Play Now | Play in Popup

 

 6-8-06 Raccoon!! (XL Quality Version) [5:10m]: Play Now | Play in Popup

 

 6-8-06 Raccoon!! (High Quality 800Kbps Version) [5:10m]: Play Now | Play in Popup

 

 6-8-06 Raccoon!! (Low Quality 300Kbps Version) [5:10m]: Play Now | Play in Popup