Uncle Matt, a wild-haired maker wearing round welding goggles Uncle Matt makes
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Critter Cam

A camera on the back door and enough software to tell the raccoons apart. We know a few of them by name now.

2026 critter camhardwarewildlife
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A raccoon sitting up on the back deck at night, caught on the critter cam

The build, start to finish

  1. A raccoon sitting upright on a stone garden wall in daylight, looking toward the camera.

    Chapter 1

    It started with an opossum

    We moved into a new place, my son spotted an opossum in the yard, and a couple of weeks after I put a camera on the back door my girlfriend called it the best project I have ever made.

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Notes from the bench

  2. The Backyard and Observatory's visit log: a grid of twelve cards from one night and morning, each with a blurry camera still, a species name, a time, and a count of observations. American crows, band-tailed pigeons, an eastern gray squirrel, Steller's jays, two raccoons and a Virginia opossum.

    Publishing it is shipping

    Putting the backyard code on GitHub meant taking my own name out of it first, and my first attempt at that looked like it had worked and hadn't. Force-pushing a rewritten history does not clear the refs GitHub keeps from old pull requests.

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  4. Black-and-white infrared trail-camera frame of a large raccoon in the foreground with a second raccoon behind it on a stone wall.

    The barbecue kept getting filed as a rat

    On one card, half of what the trail camera caught was furniture. The automatic filter finds some of it by watching what never moves, and I draw boxes around the rest by hand.

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  6. A large, thick-furred raccoon standing on a garden wall in daylight, ferns behind it.

    Biologists do this by clipping tail fur

    We spent months looking for something on a raccoon that would hold still enough to identify it by. The tail, the mask, the walk, the size, the hour it shows up. Then I looked up how the professionals do it.

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  7. Miss B, a Virginia opossum, picking her way along the top of a stacked limestone wall at night, lit pale by the camera against a dark yard.

    Am I seeing the same critter or multiple ones?

    I thought I caught a glimpse of Miss B going past the door, but she was so fast I was not sure I had seen anything. Being able to go and check is the thing this whole rig is for.

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  8. Three raccoons on paving stones in front of a stone wall at night, their banded tails clearly visible.

    We thought Stan adopted a pup

    The adults had been visiting one at a time for weeks, and then they started bringing kids. Three mothers, nine kits, and we told the software not to put a name on any of them.

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