Last Monday night I was at the Laurens Town Hall for a meeting.
The town clerk said that she had heard some fairly loud scratching sounds in one of the offices. One of the board members went out to investigate and found a piece of the steel siding on the back of the building disturbed by some animal. He put a live trap inside the building and caught a large female raccoon the very next day.
Someone asked, “Why would a raccoon want to get in the building?”
Now my logical answer would have been to find a place to den, but then I thought, it probably wanted a fishing license and couldn’t reach the doorknob to the clerk’s office.
Okay, it wasn’t that funny.
The coon was taken up towards Gilbert Lake and released, unharmed.
A couple of years ago I told you about a friend of mine who fed some baby raccoons after their mother was killed in the road. For the first week or so her husband climbed up a ladder and handed the kits down to his wife.
Every day she fixed a bowl of cat food and milk for them to eat. Soon the little rascals would climb down by themselves and eat what was left at the bottom of the big den tree alongside her horse pasture.
Early in the fall, purely by luck, she stood on her porch and watched them climb out of the hole in the tree and head down through the woods in a single-file line. She was upset; her babies were gone. They weren’t seen again until one cold, frosty winter day.
When she fed the cats in her barn, all four raccoons squeezed through the side of the large barn door and ate the cat food.
Being an animal lover, she left out extra food every night for the cats and the four coons. This past summer they even brought their offspring for dinner as well.
Now those mischievous critters were eating her out of house and home, so every day she decreased the amount of food she put out. Pretty soon the numbers also decreased. I asked her last week how many she is feeding.
“Two, sometimes three,” she answered. “I’m not sure. Some of them come at night.”
When I was in college many years ago, I worked summers at Woodland Museum above Three Mile Point in Cooperstown. I was the conductor on the steam locomotive that ran back and forth along the hillside above the lake.
The owners of the museum had a large cage where three or four raccoons lived. They sold food, so the visitors could feed them.
Then one day a fellow showed up to donate a small coon to the museum. It was as tame as your household cat. When it was put in the cage, the other raccoons nearly killed it, so I took it home, made an enclosure and nursed it back to life.
Even being somewhat tame, he would try to test out those teeth on my arm every once in a while. I would let him out of the pen and give him some attention until one day in the fall he looked up towards the woods and ran away.
I was happy that he was returning to nature but put food out every few days. Then one day he stopped coming.
You know, there’s a reason why they’re called wild animals. They weren’t meant to be kept in a cage. They can naturally fend for themselves. I’m sure that coon I had for a few weeks went off and eventually found a mate.
Hopefully he lived happily ever after.