Wednesday night at 8 p.m. ET on PBS, Nature presents a new installment, called Raccoon Nation, that includes night footage of the prowlers sneaking around city streets and back yards, like the masked bandits they resemble.
It also includes fascinating tracking data that sheds new light on how clearly defined, and how tiny, these sneaky urban dwellers’ territories really are.
But as I watch, I can’t help but think about my personal battles with raccoons. I’ve been fighting them for decades, with everything from Frisbees to Tastykakes — and have dealt with more than 30 of them coming into my house over the years, through the doggie door…
- David Bianculli on Raccoon Nation and his own raccoon encounters (via tvworthwatching)
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I may have posted this before but here is my own raccoon story (part of a longer post from 2006):
From October of 2000 till October of 2003 I lived in an apartment I now call the Raccoon Roost. It was an old house that was over 100 years old & was converted into 3 apartments. I lived on the second floor apartment. One of my biggest problems though was the raccoons. One summer M (upstairs) was away for a few days & there was a drip into my apartment. I thought there was some kind of a leak but if she wasn’t home, what was running & leaking every so often? Well, I put a bucket under it & discovered it was animal pee. Long story a little shorter….it was raccoons. Raccoon pee was raining down into my apartment, including my bedroom, and all the landlord would do is trap them & release them a mile or so away. They had ripped a hole in the eaves to get in. He had that patched but after M moved out they made their way back in. Well the momma did, and she proceeded to have babies. In my ceiling. The scratching noises that I would hear in my bedroom would wake me up from a dead sleep in the middle of the night and make me think they were gonna rip thru the ceiling and land on my face while I slept. Yeah, it was a real treat living there. I didn’t have it as bad as the people upstairs though. They had an infant and a dog, and the raccoon was coming up thru a hole in the cabinet below their sink and stealing cans of dog food (which I could hear rolling around, btw) and I think they actually came into the house too. They had a real ordeal with them & I won’t go into it, partly because I don’t remember exactly what they told me, and also it is not pretty. They ended up getting a guy to come & get them out of there. (not in a humane way either from what I recall and at that point I really didn’t care) They got the momma first and Oh My God. The screeching of the babies without their mother was bloodcurdling. Like I said, not pretty. Yeesh. Those were not happy times.
I admit when I see a dead raccoon on the road I give a little fist pump. *yesssss!*
(Source: tvworthwatching.com)
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stuft said:
aaaaahhhhhh Raccoons are evil. I had my own nightmare in my last apartment with them.
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