Raccoon rears up like a little bear

I recently received a timely request from a magazine, BWD, that I regularly work with. It's the former Bird Watcher's Digest, now truncated to the acronym. If you're into birds, on any level, I highly recommend a subscription. GO HERE for more information.

Anyway, the list of photo requests for the upcoming issue included one very specific target: an American Crow with an unshelled peanut in its bill. I can do that, thought I, as I've been working near daily trying to form a bond with a couple of the local crows. They nested this year within sight of the window where I now sit, the aerie well hidden in the crown of a towering Norway Spruce. I make regular gifts of peanuts to them, and the birds - mostly one or occasionally both adults, and a juvenile - have learned to recognize me as the peanut vendor. They now will come quite close as they exhort me to greater speed as I distribute their peanuts.

So, I waited until the light was optimal, set up my blind in a good spot in the backyard, scattered some peanuts and soon had my shot. I used the blind because at first, I was thinking that as used to me as they've become, I can just sit in a yard chair with my camera rig on a tripod in front of me. I should have known better. Crows are smarter than many people I've met, probably including myself, and the appearance of me in an odd location with what looked like a giant cannon (Canon, actually) aimed in their direction did not sit well with the birds. They cawed and rattled and sought new vantage points but would not drop down for the peanuts. Once I hid myself and the rig in the blind, I soon had success.

Crow with unshelled peanut. As always, click the image to enlarge.

It was getting late in the day as I worked the peanut-eating corvids, and thus I wasn't too surprised when a sow Raccoon ambled along, her keen nose apparently having detected the nuts.

I know that "coons" generate a lot of dislike, but even though I've had my fair share of issues with the wily beasts, I greatly admire them. And when she presented herself such as above, and I'm looking down the barrel of a big telephoto lens, there's no way I'm not taking advantage.

But crows, not coons, were my primary targets and the masked bandido's presence kept the birds at bay. So, a few times I had to pop from the blind and spook her off.

After the third time of me springing from the blind and making odd noises to startle her back under cover, she was leery, but the allure of peanuts still brought her back. This time, to better get a sense of her surroundings and the possible location of the annoying person (me), she reared up like a little bear, giving me a wonderful series of interesting shots. So, success on two counts with two of the smartest critters around.

Nature: Outfoxing wily raccoons is not a simple task

A raccoon raiding one of Jim McCormac's bird feeders/Jim McCormac

Nature: Outfoxing wily raccoons is not a simple task

Columbus Dispatch
November 1, 2020

NATURE
Jim McCormac

Raccoons are abundant, range throughout Ohio and might be our most instantly recognizable wild mammal.

Close relatives of bears, they are immediately identifiable by their black-bandit mask and ringed tail. A big one can weigh 35 pounds. The wily mammals occur in nearly all habitats and thrive in citified landscapes. Raccoons are consummate omnivores, meaning that they will eat nearly anything. The meal plan includes our castoffs, as victims of plundered trash cans have learned.

In northern climes, raccoons go on autumnal food binges, packing on massive quantities of fat. Up to one-third of a successful glutton’s bodyweight is blubber. So much fat is stored that a raccoon can ride out winter without eating, if need be. They don’t truly hibernate, but will remain holed up in a den for extended periods during cold snaps.

We are smack in the midst of raccoon fat-storage season. This is when the masked bandits stage frequent raids on bird feeders — not that they wouldn’t during any other season. Seed meant for songbirds is easy pickings.

I feed birds, and have several feeders. The raccoons ignore the thistle feeder, which mostly attracts goldfinches. (Thistle seed is too small to interest the big bruisers.) They do, however, like my suet feeder, and at one time could access the hook that it hung on. The furry thieves would take the suet cage down, open it up and ravage the contents.

After the last suet raid, it took me more than a week to find the feeder. A raccoon had dragged it into the crevasse between my shed and the garage wall. It’s a miracle I ever noticed it, and recovery required rigging a pole-mounted grappling hook to fish it out.

Afterward, I found a shepherd’s-hook pole that was too skinny for the raccoons to climb. The suet dangled 6 feet over the heads of the frustrated furry freeloaders. One night, thought, a crew excavated the deep-seated pole from its ground mount, toppled it and made off with the suet. I am hard at work on Plan C.

My biggest battles involve my largest seed feeder, another pole-mounted job. In spring, a jumbo adult sow began bringing two young kits around. She would agilely climb the pole, using the raccoon baffle as a foothold, then fling pawfuls of seed down to the youngsters.

This was cute for a while. But it wasn’t long before the young raccoons could climb up, and sometimes I would pop the night light on to see a trio of them on the platform. Sometimes I would go out for a word with them, and they would smugly saunter off — only to return later that night.

As the seed bills spiked, I decided to outsmart these raccoons. I removed the raccoon baffle and heavily greased the pole with Vaseline. That worked for one night. By the second night, they had rubbed it all off and were back atop the feeder.

I activated a motion sensor on the nearby night light, figuring an unexpected dose of bright light would chase them into the shadows. No go — I could just better see them laughing at me.

My friends weighed in with all sorts of raccoon-thwarting advice, most of it bad. Some of the fatalists said I would never win, that the raccoons are smarter than I am. They might be right.

But for now, I have won. I pop the feeder off its mount most evenings, and stow it in the locked garage. I suspect it’s only a matter of time before the raccoons figure out how to break in. I just hope they don’t steal my car.

Naturalist Jim McCormac writes a column for The Dispatch on the first and third Sundays of the month. He also writes about nature at www.jim mccormac.blogspot.com.

 

Raccoons raiding feeders

 

A young but already robust Raccoon, Procyon lotor, treats your narrator's bird feeder as its buffet. The masked bandidos are a nightly occurrence in the backyard.

I don't mind them, too much. Raccoons are clever, adaptable, and engaging mammals and they're darn good looking to boot. They do cause problems, perhaps especially with the raccoon-borne Raccoon Roundworm, which causes a disease that can be devastating to Allegheny Woodrats among other organisms. And a lot of people seem to hate coons just because of their very traits of intelligence and adaptability. If a family unit gets access to your attic, I suppose such a sentiment would be understandable. For me, the coons are strictly outdoors - the house seems tightly sealed and I've never had any issues with Raccoons or other mammals other than the rare White-footed Mouse getting in.

I made this photo back on August 17, when the mother was still escorting her two kits around. This spring, when they were very young and could not yet climb up the feeder, she would sweep seed off the feeder and down to the ground for them. It didn't take too long for them to manage to clamber up, though.

I've had fun on Facebook posting photos of "my" Raccoons, and joshing about my ongoing battles with the feeder-raiding coons. The truth is, with only slight effort, they are pretty easy to defeat. If I really don't want them plundering my feeders - which only happens at night - I just take them down and put them in the (apparently coon-proof) shed. It takes less than a minute to stow them and the same to put the feeders back out in the morning.

But sometimes I leave them out, just because I like to watch the masked bandidos.

Photo Note: With these two images, you are looking at extreme ISO: 32,000! For instance, the first shot was handheld, at 1/40 and f/2. The other photo used about the same parameters although it was at f/2.8 using a different lens. By the time the Raccoons come around, it is generally pitch black. In the second shot, the image was made in the dark. For the first, I had an outdoor light on which provides better illumination, but the coons don't like that and will usually leave the feeder if I leave it on for long. I'm shooting through a (very clean) window and am close to the animals, so images do not have to be cropped much - cropping would greatly exacerbate the graininess of such high ISO images. A better solution would be to use flash, and maybe I'll have to play with that a bit.

Masked bandidos stage a raid

This was the scene at my main bird feeder the other night. Not one, not two, but three yearling raccoons helping themselves to my seed. Their mom taught them to do this. Earlier in the year, when these guys were much smaller, they'd gather around the base of this feeder. Mom would scale up - and over my "anti-mammal" baffle, and then start flinging seed down to the youngsters. In short order, she - and now they - clean the feeder out.

My attempts to thwart them, or at least some of them, have met with temporary success. But the coons eventually engineer a solution. They are clever, make no mistake.

I have a new plan. I think it may work, and prevent the masked bandits from climbing this feeder. I'm not yet saying what my plan is, for fear of jinxing myself. However, if long-term success is achieved I'll gladly share my battle plan.

No sleep is lost over this on my part. I consider battling marauding raccoons at a backyard bird feeder very much a first-world problem. Beside, I must admit to a certain fondness for the clever critters.

PHOTO NOTE: This is what ISO 32,000 looks like, as created by the Canon 5D IV. Even with noise reduction applied later, it isn't pretty. It was pitch-black when I made the shot, and it was through a window. Flash would have reflected back, so it wasn't used. If I go outside where I could use flash, I won't get this kind of shot, most likely. As soon as they see me, the coons usually go on alert and scramble down. I've yelled at them one too many times, I guess :-) As a testament to Canon's superb image stabilization, the shot was made at 1/15, handheld, at f/2.8 (with the Canon 400mm f/2.8L II).

Raccoons well-suited for survival

 

RACCOONS WELL-SUITED FOR SURVIVAL

Columbus Dispatch
Sunday, December 29, 2013

NATURE
Jim McCormac

Edward Crump presided over Tennessee’s political machine for much of the first half of the 20th century. The former Memphis mayor, in campaigning against political foe Estes Kefauver, portrayed the Democratic challenger for a U.S. Senate seat as being “raccoonlike” and a “communist puppet."
In response, Kefauver wore a raccoon-skin cap when on the stump and stated, “I may be a pet coon, but I’m not Boss Crump’s pet coon.”

Kefauver won the 1948 election handily.

Being compared to a raccoon isn’t such a bad thing. It’s more flattering than being compared to a skunk.

Raccoons are abundant and range throughout Ohio. Close relatives of bears, they are instantly identifiable by their black bandit mask and ringed tail. A big one can weigh 35 pounds. The wily mammals occur in all habitats and may thrive best in citified landscapes.

Raccoons are consummate omnivores, meaning that they’ll eat almost anything. The meal plan includes our castoffs, as victims of plundered trash cans have learned.

The Algonquin Indian name for raccoon is aroughcoune, which means “He scratches with his hands.” These masked bandits indeed have handlike paws, and their prints are easily recognized along muddy creek banks. Raccoons use their appendages with great dexterity, and they can open refrigerator doors, gates and other impediments that would thwart most beasts.

They are great climbers and often spotted high in trees. To facilitate headfirst descents, a raccoon can rotate its hind paws 180 degrees.

In northern climes, raccoons go on autumnal food binges, packing on massive quantities of fat. Up to a third of a successful glutton’s body weight is blubber. So much fat is stored that a raccoon can ride out winter without eating, if need be. They don’t truly hibernate but will remain holed up in a den for extended periods during cold snaps. Come spring, a raccoon might weigh half of what it did at winter’s onset.

For such a seemingly bright animal, raccoons don’t make their own dens. They use tree cavities, rocky crevices, hollow logs and sometimes storm sewers. Motorists are sometimes startled to see two eyes glowing from a sewer’s grate, reflected by the car’s headlights.

Raccoons mate in late winter or early spring, and the female gives birth to as many as eight coonlets in April or May. They grow rapidly, and before long will be sneaking through the night plundering crayfish from creeks and raiding unprotected trash cans. The mincing humpbacked gait of a coon is unmistakable.

In the 1950s, ABC aired a TV series featuring Fess Parker as the coonskin-capped Davy Crockett. Sales of the furry headgear skyrocketed to 5,000 a day. By the mid-1970s, the raccoon was the most economically important North American fur bearer.

By the early 1980s, a prime pelt could fetch $30 — now, about $72. Today, exterminators probably make more money from raccoons than trappers do.

Naturalist Jim McCormac writes a column for The Dispatch on the first and third Sundays of the month. He also writes about nature at www.jimmccormac.blogspot.com.

Motorboating raccoon

I really like raccoons, and that, I know, is not a universal sentiment. Get a couple of the masked bandits in the attic, and chaos can ensue. The wily beasts discover your garbage in the garage, and havoc might be wrought. But you've got to hand it to the critters - they are nearly on a par with most humans (so it would seem) when it comes to smarts.

David and Laura Hughes sent me several outstanding trail cam videos recently, including the following. We've all seen the little handlike paw prints of raccoons on the muddy banks of streams and ponds, and here is one in the act of making those prints. But what is really cool is its buddy, who soon swims into the picture. He/she is just happily motorboating about, so it would seem.

Video: David and Laura Hughes

Raccoons, Procyon lotor. Shot in October, 2013, Monroe County, Ohio.