I generally feed the birds this time of year. Except for this year. It wasn’t that I forgot to put my feeders back up. I had taken them down over the summer because of the parasite infection that has been infecting some birds. I like the birds, so I don’t want to hurt them just to see them.
But I decided not to put my feeder back up because I was tired of feeding the raccoons. I had tried to find a way to keep the feeder out of reach. It had moved to several different locations over the past few years, until I had it suspended over a branch, held by by a rather slippery piece of clothes line. They couldn’t get that, I thought. Until the dog and I went out one night and spotted the raccoon, sitting on the branch, pulling the line closer as it backed down. Eventually, the feeder got close enough the raccoon could grab it.
The dog looked at me and basically informed me with a knowing dog look that I had been outsmarted… by a raccoon. I had to agree. The dog is pretty smart some days.
So this year I had been leaving the feeder down. I have a simple platform feeder I have been using sporadically. I put out a few seeds, the birds and a squirrel or two clean them up, and all seems well. I haven’t seen any sign of raccoons. Until this past weekend.
I was headed out to throw a handful of seeds onto the feeder when I saw tracks. Kind of like dog tracks. Only they had long fingers. Dogs don’t have fingers. Raccoons have fingers. But how did he know.
I followed the tracks back a ways, across a couple of yards. The little bit of fresh snow petered out in places until I finally lost them, but this did not seem to be a randomly wandering raccoon. This animal walked straight to my feeder from several houses away. He didn’t just wander around until he found a few seeds. He somehow knew they were there. From a distance.
I don’t know how he managed this. The common trash panda seems to always find ways to surprise me. Now I can imagine this one, sitting in the crowd at the annual Raccoon Awards, as the presenter says, “And now for the Nose of the Year Award, going to the raccoon who can smell a single sunflower seed, downwind, at a distance of 500 yards…”
Yep. That’s my raccoon.
