Ancient Web: Varmint Al Made an MP3 Sound Library and a Personal Field Notebook

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Varmint Al's hunting page is part outdoor diary, part homemade recording studio, and part instruction manual for a computer that still has a folder called My Documents.

Visit Varmint Al’s original hunting page.

Al describes hunting, fishing, ham radio, computer tinkering, and life with his Labrador retrievers Bart, Tide, and SusieQ. His main page last reports an update in July 2015, while individual notes carry earlier dates from the 2000s.

The most unusual part is an enormous archive of animal-call recordings. Visitors are offered downloadable MP3s labeled as coyote howls, woodpecker noises, jackrabbit calls, and even frightened little dogs. The author records where sounds came from, whether contributors emailed them, and how he edited or combined tracks.

A very old audio workflow

In one note dated February 2006, Al says he remastered several files, normalized their levels, and converted them to MP3. Elsewhere he explains how to right-click a link, save a file into My Documents, and transfer it to an MP3 player plugged into a USB port on a Windows XP machine.

That may be the most revealing preservation detail. A reader is not expected to stream anything from a phone. Digital audio is a file, the file has to be moved, and an inexpensive player becomes part of a field experiment.

The page also preserves messages from other enthusiasts. Dick Wendell contributes photographs of a moving decoy made from a toy, and another reader writes about an adaptation assembled from parts found locally. The submitted material makes this a community workshop, not simply one person's monologue.

Around the main page are links to Al's engineering work, finite-element analyses, miniature machining, computers, ham radio, family stories, and travel photographs. Some exterior links now point to defunct suppliers or older software instructions.

This collection includes descriptions of hunting firearms, but its historical relevance is the self-published archive of recordings, personal observations, and technical correspondence. Old field notes are not a guarantee of current safety, legal rules, or wildlife-management advice.

Browse the field diary and audio index and the site's engineering pages.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.