I don’t really feel like writing about politics today, but I was fascinated by this story about a lady whose property was overrun by a hundred demanding raccoons. I suppose the moral is obvious. Don’t feed raccoons. But the details were still interesting.
For more than 35 years, a woman in Washington State would leave some food in her yard for about a dozen resident raccoons.
The key word in that sentence is “dozen.”
Six weeks ago, the number of raccoons began to increase. “Somehow the word got out in raccoon land, and they all showed up to her house expecting a meal,” Kevin McCarty, a spokesman for the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office, told NBC 9 news.
Wait a minute, the sheriff’s department? How much did this thing escalate?
A lot. The newer raccoons began scratching around the woman’s house near Poulsbo, Wash., all night demanding food. “Anytime she comes out of her home, they swarm her until she throws them food,” the sheriff’s department said in a statement. “The normal raccoons that she feeds are nice, but the new ones showing up scare her.”
By last Thursday afternoon the newly scary raccoons had grown to a horde of about 100, prompting the woman, whose name has not been released, to call 911. Her concern was increased by the newer arrivals’ greater aggression after years of dealing with a relatively docile, much smaller band.
She was understandably freaked out by their sheer numbers, but the fact that the newcomers were an ornery bunch reminded me of how criminally-minded humans prey on weaknesses in every system. The original bunch had a good deal. They stayed well-behaved and they got free food. But inevitably that kind of arrangement can’t stand for long before someone comes along and ruins it. It was a good run though: thirty-five years.
Around these parts we have a different problem. We are absolutely overrun with deer. I drive at dusk a lot, mostly taking my son to and from soccer practices, and I almost always encounter deer by the roadside, crossing the road, or just see herds of them in the fields. On Wednesday morning I dropped my stepson off at his house at 2:00 am after we went to a concert in Manhattan, and leaving his house I had a deer run straight out in front of the car. There was no way to stop in time, but I got down to about 10mph or so before impact. I hit the thing broadside right in its ribs, and I was shocked at how far it went. It scooted along the road for about 30 yards until it went off into someone’s driveway. It scampered to its feet and ran off.
I collected myself for a moment, and continued on home. About a mile later, a had to slam on the brakes because a buck was right on the roadside. And then a half mile further on, I had a repeat with a doe. I made a turn towards home, and a doe was standing in the road. And finally, I passed another deer only seeing it as I passed. Basically, I hit one deer and almost hit five during a twenty minute drive.
When I got home, I used my phone flashlight to check for damage and I didn’t see any. I confirmed this in the morning. I’m just glad I was able to slow down so much because it spared my car and also perhaps saved my life. When those deer come up at the windshield it can be trouble.
A lot of the local forums are discussing the problem. I’m not sure what to do about it. It’s too densely populated to solve much by hunting. I guess we could import mountain lions or something, but that’s not very appealing for obvious reasons.
A couple of years ago the deer were dying from some disease, but I guess that didn’t continue. Anyway, do you have any wildlife issues near you?
I’ve learned that scientists call this the “WUI” – Wildlife Urban Interface. In my area the Santa Cruz Mountains are basically part of suburbia; I’m on a high-deer road at least once a week, my friend near the ridge sees mountain lions on his outside cameras. Personally I live in the flatlands with mostly only squirrels and possums, occasional skunks and raccoons. I haven’t seen coyotes here but friends not far away have.
I’m glad I don’t live near cats bigger than I am. We have bears, but I’ve never encountered one, and they’re the black variety, so a little less frightening than the brown ones out West.
Thank you for this post. It is kind of nice to write about something that’s not political. For so many of us it’s hard to step away from that world and allow ourselves to just talk about other stuff that that doesn’t aggravate our stress.
We feed the birds year-round, and when warm weather comes we inevitably get the parade of raccoons at the feeders during the night. It’s rare they would come in the daylight hours. They almost always find a way to pull them down, and we wake up to feeders strewn around the yard. This year I started bringing the feeders into the garage at night. After dark I would usually shine the flashlight out back and the raccoons would be scratching around in the grass, and stretching on their hind legs to get a look at the ends of the shepherd’s hooks, looking for their meal. After a while, they would waddle off. One time, years ago, a momma raccoon brought her four babies to the feeders. Mom would just sit back while the little ones tried a million different ways to reach the feeders, but they would end up just eating off the ground. Once sated, they would all head back into our woods and disappear into the darkness. They were pretty cute, and we tolerated the gang for the whole summer. There was one time a raccoon showed up during the day, and it was being a pest. Our dog was going nuts, and she really wanted to get at it. I knew that wouldn’t end well. I had the garden hose lying in the yard, so grabbed it, set the nozzle on “FULL SPRAY” and proceeded to nail the coon right between the eyes with the spray. Well, instead of running away, the bastard started hissing and growling and it charged me! I dropped the hose and danced into the house as it made its way onto the back porch. Eventually it wandered out into the yard, but it wouldn’t leave. I grabbed the hose again and figured “What the hell”, and started spraying its ass end. It ran around my house and dove into the damn basement window well, where it was now trapped, about 30 inches down, and it was not happy. Took me about 45 minutes to engineer a way to get that coon out of the window well, and once it was free it ran off into the woods to chill for the rest of the day.
The deer around here have been my arch enemy for years. We’ve gardened here since 1998, and they have always been a pest in the garden, but were never a major pain in the ass. Well, in both 2022 & 2023 they ravaged my garden. They either ate or destroyed almost everything, and I have a sizeable garden plot. I was pretty pissed. So this spring I decided I would install a critter fence. I spent a sizeable sum enclosing my garden with an 8 foot high heavy-duty mesh fencing, which included a couple of gates to get my tractor in and out of the space. It worked. We had no critter problems at all, big or small. I guess I would consider it money and effort well spent.
Almost everyone has a story to tell about their vehicle encounter with a deer on the road. My wife hit a large buck years ago, when she was on the way to a Christmas cookie exchange at the local library. She called me crying and in a panic, more about the fact that she was worried about the deer, which jumped up and ran off. Just to show how people around here are about potential trophy deer, when the deputy sheriff arrived at the scene she was telling him about how big the deer was, and how large a rack it had. A guy had come out of house nearby and was intently listening to her describe this deer. He went back to his house and retrieved a big spotlight. While searching around the area of the impact, he found a large piece of antler. His eyes got real big, and he asked her which way it ran after it jumped up. She pointed out across a very large and barren cornfield, and this guy immediately jumped over the fence and headed out into the darkness with his flashlight, in a quest for that big buck. The shit that people will do to hang a fucking deer head on their wall.
I’ve never hit a deer, myself. But when I was in high school I was a passenger in a car that had an encounter with a different animal. Deer were rare around here when I was in high school, so you never really worried about hitting one, or really any other large animal. Large dogs were about all you might run across in the road. If you ever even saw a deer, it was a memorable day. My best friend in high school had a 1972 Buick Riviera. It was a fucking colossal machine! We were out running around one Friday night after a football game. We were on a two lane country road, probably doing 55 or 60 mph. At that time our area outside of towns and villages was largely farmland. There were all sorts of farms. A lot of corn and soybeans, but also a fair share of dairy and beef cattle, and also some pig farming. As we barreled down that dark country road, suddenly, in the headlights, stood a fucking massive bull. It looked like it took up both lanes of the road. My friend slammed on the brakes but we skidded straight into the side of that bull, hitting him almost perfectly square. The bull never went down. We knocked it several feet, and it stumbled around in the road until it got its equilibrium, and it wandered off into the darkness. Amazingly, the damage to the car was relatively minor. At that point we decided to call it a night, and headed back to his house to shoot some hoops.
My buddy went on to graduate from college and join the Army, and eventually retired from there. He now lives down south and spends his time tending rental properties, playing Conjunto music, and working part time as a disc jockey. And me, I’m retired and doing whatever it is I do, and trying to figure out where I go from here. Life sure does fly by. Hard to imagine this was almost 50 years ago.
If you see a raccoon during the day, stay away. There’s a good chance they’re rabid.
I’ve heard that said, but this raccoon was not exhibiting any behavior that indicated it was sick. I think it was just foraging the free and easy food that I had out. Word gets around when there lots of free shit available on a regular basis.
I tried a baited camera survey for deer at Wolf Trap but the raccoons ate all of the bait before the deer had any chance at it. It will take 50 years but chronic wasting disease is is going to decimate the deer population, It’s well-entrenched in the Gettysburg area and it’s moving east to DC and Baltimore.
I used to encounter the occasional deer when I was still making my commute from my current town up to the heart of the Northwest Arkansas region and back. I never hit one, thankfully, but they did startle me each time. Since my city is surrounded by woods, farmland, and ranchland, I do see plenty of wildlife. Last spring when the Northern Lights were visible down in my part of Arkansas, I decided to drive somewhere with less light pollution. By the time I found a spot that suited my needs, the Northern Lights were no longer visible. So it goes. I did encounter a wolf crossing the country road I was driving on. Mostly though I see plenty of squirrels and rabbits, and the occasional possum. If they wouldn’t kill my sunflowers, I’d appreciate it, but I doubt I have a lot of control over that.
The saving grace of deer is that you can eat them, and they are delicious.
I know people from the NE Pennsylvania bluegrass scene who are hunters. They carry around deer cleaning (processing? gutting? I don’t know the proper term) equipment in their vehicles in case they witness a collision. My understanding is that if you clean out the guts really quick, even roadkill can yield several pounds of usable meat.
Our biggest problem is the stray and feral cats. One household a block away had multiple litters, and they set up a feeding station on city land near a creek and started feeding them. Another neighbor has been diligently doing trap / alter / release – cleaning up what’s not her mess – but it’s hard to trap every cat. And now we have a few campsites for unhoused people a few blocks further away, and they’ve brought in their own litters of kittens. I fear a cat explosion.