[Magdalen] Where do they live?

[Marion Thompson]

Ha ha ha.  Come to Toronto where raccoons reign supreme!      They have adapted very well to living with city dwellers and are readily seen at twilight and beyond.  Omniverous, they have fully mastered the art of opening ever-more-clever ‘raccoon-proof’ garbage containers with their clever hands and settle happily in attics and garages where they raise their adorable children and go out on skittering chattering raids of an evening.  I think they are cute and never had a problem, but some see them as vermin of the worst sort.  They do poop in favourite places and can make an awful mess of their living area.

Marion, a pilgrim

Sent from Mail for Windows 10

From: M J _Mike_ Logsdon
Sent: October 18, 2018 8:10 AM
To: magdalen at herberthouse.org
Subject: [Magdalen] Where do they live?

As I was leaving my bathroom this evening (last evening, I suppose, actually) and turned off the light, I saw movement in my small apartment backyard.  I'm used to seeing cats on the fence, so that's what I expected, but movement is movement, so I needed to investigate.  Keeping the light off so I could see, I was struck by three things:  (1) the cat I saw on the fence was HUGE, (2) it didn't skitter down the other side of the fence immediately as normal, and (3) the striped tail and the bandit mask revised my opinion on the spot as to what I was witnessing.

My Backyard Masked Animal showed no typical animosity as often seen on TV, but that could've been because it was smart enough to know that a face looking out of a dark room in a building was hardly gonna leap out and challenge it.  It quickly, but smoothly, made its way down the other side of the fence like the cats do, but with no sign of anxiety on its part whatsoever.

Yes, it was my first raccoon.  But being a city dweller where such things are seldom seen, that shouldn't be a surprise.  And I did look up and find the following, which explains a bit:

"New habitats which have recently been occupied by raccoons (aside from urban areas) include mountain ranges, such as the Western Rocky Mountains, prairies and coastal marshes.  After a population explosion starting in the 1940s, the estimated number of raccoons in North America in the late 1980s was 15 to 20 times higher than in the 1930s, when raccoons were comparatively rare.  Urbanization, the expansion of agriculture, deliberate introductions, and the extermination of natural predators of the raccoon have probably caused this increase in abundance and distribution." (Wikipedia excerpt.)

Its a reference beyond ("aside from") urban areas, which my area basically is, but, still, -- where does such a clearly well-fed raccoon actually live?  Grant you, I'm not terribly far from hundreds of miles of ag fields, but something made this well-fed monster decide to "come into town and make a night of it".  Would such a creature maybe have an actual life here, in town, even in my neighborhood?  Doesn't bother me one whit.  I'm just curious.

And my Masked Friend makes the second "wild" animal I've encountered in this part of my town.  Long ago, my route to work was detoured to the extreme to make ample room for law enforcement and animal specialists to deal with the (from what I remember) very young bear that somehow made it into the neighborhood I actually now live in.  Raccoons, yes.  But bears?  They happen in Monterey and Carmel all the time, because they have heavily wooded areas close nearby, and can actually be said to be situated within same.  But Salinas Valley flatland?  All I can admit to right now, is that we do have "mountains ranges" nearby.

M J (Mike) Logsdon.

"Aaugh[.]" -- Charles Brown.
"Avoid dull needles and use a soft cloth." -- E Kovacs.
"Because that's the kind of guy, I'm." -- C Reiner, "Your Show of Shows", skit: "From Here to Obscurity".