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Townie raccoon cause for concern
By adamg on Wed, 02/29/2012 - 10:16am
Ramblin' Rocky out in daylight.
Cara posted this photo yesterday afternoon of a raccoon out and about in the daylight in Charlestown. People immediately suggested she call Animal Control because normally the only raccoons venturing forth with the sun up are rabid.
Kristin MacDougall reports there was a raccoon waddling around the Navy Yard around 11 a.m. yesterday.
If it's the same one, s/he walked a long way uphill.
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Comments
More Wildlife Tales
I've seen raccoons out whenever there is food to be had. They adapt to human patterns. Even if they prefer darkness, they go out at all hours to exploit garbage and food sources. When we started putting our trash out at the curb without all the bungees, etc. of a Wednesday morning, the racoons would come out mid-morning after people went to work and school and dump the cans over.
The way to tell if an animal is rabid is "is it acting very strangely and aggressively and psychotically" not "is it out in daytime". Raccoons ae opportunists and don't read our guidbooks - they just exploit the resources they can get to. I once saw one grab a herring out of the Mystic from the river bank!
There's another reason a raccoon may be out in the day time
It could be pregnant. That one looks pretty big and may very well be pregnant. While growing up in suburbia, there were raccoons living in our barn and one afternoon one was out ambling around our yard, so fearing it was rabid, my mother called the dog officer (who turned up with a police officer -at the time, rabid animals would usually be euthanized on the spot by a police officer trained to do so with their service pistol, as the dog officer wasn't armed). The dog officer took one look at the raccoon and said, "she's fine she's just pregnant and about to have her litter. She's looking for a place to do it. Just keep your cat in and leave her alone, she won't bother you". A week or so later, my brother spotted her and her litter peeking out at us from her nest inside a branch that had rotted out from the inside in an old maple tree in a corner of the yard. A few weeks later, we watched (from inside the house) as she her move her litter, one by one, across the back yard from the tree back to her original nest under the eaves of the barn.
Urban Racoons
PBS aired an episode of Nature recently that dealt with urban racoons. Generally, they found that coons have established territories that don't cross major arteries (they have adapted to traffic). A coon might cover 1/2 to a mile a day and will only travel at about 60 meters per hour.
I recommend the episode (http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/episodes/raccoon-na...). I learned a ton about those critters that aren't going away anytime soon.
I almost stepped a raccoon
I almost stepped on a raccoon walking around a building yesterday in the Navy Yard around 12:40. It was very amble-ly in its walking and didn't seem afraid of people at all. It was reported to some type of authority, though I do not know to whom.
There is also a one eared squirrel in the Yard and a pair of red tailed hawks.
When I lived in somerville
I was in an apartment with a nice screened in back porch. It was a first floor and there was a little porch left outside the screen steps down to the ground. Me and my roommates used it to store our old beer bottles before bringing them to redemption and also had a trash can to throw waste food compost in.
I went the back porch way to my car one night and heard something so stopped. Turned on the light and looked through the screen door to see 5 juvenile racoons having a ball with the discarded corn on the cob we grilled up the night before.
They looked up at me like "dude, really? we're eating here". Then one by one meandered down the porch and into the brush behind the house.
Probably wouldn't have been so well if I didn't hear something and ran into them in the darkness, which I was close to doing. But if they don't feel threatened, they're actually pretty calm when going about their business.
Raccoons are quite temperamental, and can get nasty:
Raccoons are quite temperamental and can get quite nasty if and when they feel threatened and/or cornered.