So not one, but two raccoons took up residence in a tree in our neighbors’ yard last night, somewhere around three in the morning. It seems they were having some kind of loud domestic argument. They didn’t appear to be rabid or anything. In fact, they were sleeping until I went and took this picture. From the relative size of the two animals, I’m guessing they’re mother and child. Our dogs are guessing they’re…well, lunch. I’m pretty sure these two raccoons combined outweigh any one of our dogs. I’m also guessing the raccoons have a much greater survival instinct than dogs that get fed twice a day and whose occupations consist mainly of sitting on the couch and pulling paper towels out of the garbage. It’s a fight I have no intention of witnessing, so the dogs will remain indoors until these guys move on.
Where we live isn’t exactly rural, but there’s a quite a thriving population of raccoons. I attribute this to the abundance of unmaintained decorative fruit trees. The pickins’ are pretty good, I imagine. They don’t have much in the way of predators in an urban area like ours. If they keep to themselves and stay out of trouble, I think most people are content to let them be.
I’ve always thought raccoons were really interesting creatures. They’re very smart and have eerily human-like hands. I read somewhere that raccoons have roughly the same portion of their brains wired to their sense of touch as humans have to sight. I imagine this is probably pretty useful if you spend most of your waking hours stumbling about in the dark. Raccoons are decidedly nocturnal, and it looks like this pair picked this tree to camp out in for the daylight hours.
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