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.
For a while the adults came through one at a time. Ate off the plate, had a look around, went home. We knew all of them by sight by then, which took months of watching and a lot of clicking.
Then they started bringing kids.
Stan came first, with three. That was a big enough surprise on its own. A few days later there were four out there, and we spent a good while trying to work out where Stan had picked up another pup. Adopted it, maybe. We could not account for it.
It was not Stan. It was CutiePie, with four of her own.
What sorted it out was posture. Stan is named for standing up on her back legs to get a look at the plate, and when she settles in to eat she drops into this proud-momma sit. Cutie does not do that. Once I knew to look for it the two families came apart easily.
Pedro brought her two along after that. Pedro’s kits are the ones that show up with Pedro, which is about as clever as the method gets.
The software will not help
The software could put a name on them. We told it not to.
When a mother is out with her young, every animal in the frame gets stamped with a group name instead of an individual one. Stan + Kits, rather than Stan.
The reason is that the software learns what each raccoon looks like from the photos I have confirmed by hand, and those confirmed photos are what every later guess gets measured against. If it blended a mother and three kits into one idea of “Stan”, it would not only get the kits wrong. It would wreck the reference photos for Stan herself, and everything after that would be a little worse. Claude worked that one out well before I would have.
So it was taught to refuse. Two animals in the same frame are never the same animal, so when a family is at the plate the system will tell me there are at least three animals down there and then decline to put a name on any of them.
There are zero labelled kit detections in the entire database.
Which leaves the counting to us, at the window, with coffee. Stan has three, Cutie has four, Pedro has two. No names for the kits yet.
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