This has been the second summer since I moved into this house that I decided not to uncover the pool. Not enough use out of it, versus the expense of the upkeep. Since the middle off July, tho, I had been noticing a wet patch, about four feet square, in the middle of the cover each morning, and also that this patch was often strewn with small stones.

At first I was putting this down to separate events. Perhaps the wind had rolled the stones to the edge of the cover, and, since it saggs slightly toward the middle, gravity had taken care of the rest. And perhaps that sag somehow accounted for the wet patch. (Can a pool experience tides?)

Then, about two weeks ago, I noticed the footprints. Handprints more like. That distinctive, almost human shape is what finally clued me in to what was going on. Raccoons, as anyone who has ever watched a Nature show probably knows, like to wash their food. And the locals have obviously figured out that if they carry their food into the center of my pool cover, their weight will push the cover down to the level of the water in the pool, and they will have a small, private pond to do their washing.

And that's where my thread title comes in -- cuz, ya know, it seems to me like that's not something a raccoon would have discovered accidentally. Oh, sure, I can see where a coon family might have come waddling across the yard and, without realizing what it was or what would happen, across the pool cover. But once the water appeared and then disappeared as they moved on, it would have demanded at least a degree of reason for the raccoons to not only figure out what was happening, but that they could repeat the process deliberately. And make use of it.

Small digression. Just yesterday I was reading about the reason moths fly into lightbulbs and, more fatally, candle flames. Simply stated, it has to do with the way they use fixed, distant light sources, like the Sun and Moon, to navigate. Since those light sources are at what is called "optical infinity", their light rays, reaching the moth's compound eyes are, for all intents and purposes, parallel. So the moth can fix on that light coming in at a particular angle and travel in a straight line from point to point. But candles and lightbulbs and all other such form of artificial light are much, much closer than the Sun and Moon, and so the light from them radiates, like the spokes from a wheel. A moth that tries to follow the light from a candle will, in fact, spiral in and immolate itself. The problem is that artificial light is too new, and moths have not had the chance to adapt to it, on an evolutionary basis. And moths, unlike raccoons, don't do much in the way of thinking, at least so far as we know.

But here, with the Coon Crew's use of my pool cover, we see animals adapting to something for which their evolutionary track can in no way have prepared them. There is no natural equivalent to a pool cover stretched out just far enough above the water that the weight of the animal will push it down into that water. This is something the raccoons (at least one of them) have to have figured out. And then remembered, from night to night. Smart!