Early morning raccoon melodrama?

It was 3 am and the motion sensor had activated the spotlight in the front yard , so for about five minutes I could see clearly what was going on. Directly below me, near Bren's parked car, was a mother raccoon with two very small babies - and she was angry and alert.

She kept looking all around, then suddenly I saw another raccoon start to approach from the direction of the backyard. She went running at it, chasing it away. Then, I am quite sure a second one approached from another direction and she chased it too.

She returned to her two kits - is that what you call baby raccoons? - and she seemed to be counting noses and instructing them to stay still. Then she was peering under the car. The third adult raccoon was apparently approaching from that direction and she scurried underneath the car - in a moment a racoon emerged going faster than I knew a raccoon could travel with the mother hot on its tail. The apparent intruder went over the wall and into the next yard and mom came back to the babies. She sat there a moment with them and the light went out.

I went to the bathroom, returned to bed, and the light was on again, but this time there was one lone baby raccoon. He was sitting still in the same location where I had seen him before, but no adults were in sight. He didn't move. It was like he had been given orders not to budge. I watched, nothing happened, and then the light went out again.

That was it . The picture with this posting is not from last night's visit. It's one Bren snapped in June of 2001. Racoons are simply part of the feeder population here. I only half fill the feeder each day because whatever is left in it by night, the racoons will empty. At first I thought that one of the intruders this morning might have been the fox, but it wasn't. They were all raccoons. So what was going on? Are perhaps adult, male racoons a threat to babies?

The next morning Bren asked me if I had heard the racket around 3 a.m. She said it sounded terrible - all she could think wast an owl had caught a dove and the dove was screaming in pain. I, of course, heard nothing, but the timing fit the skirmish I saw. I suspect they're like people. I can well imagine them exchanging curses and threats like teenage toughs.

Posted by Greg Stone at May 28, 2003 04:03 AM