my upstairs neighbor

D

Dan

Member
Speaking of wild animals that do perhaps too well living among humans, check out this cute little guy.

Unfortunately he truly is living above my bedroom. There's a hole on the side of the roof and it's big enough for him to get in. So far all attempts at keeping him off the roof have failed. He (or she, I have no idea what gender it is) appears to be shimmying up the drain pipes, and even putting spiked collars around the pipes hasn't stopped him. So far a wire mesh fence has him blocked off to a small part of the attic, instead of a suite he's living in more of a studio apartment. The final solution is going to have to be a repair job on the roof, though.

The encounter where I shot this was interesting. I'd just come home from dinner and for some reason happened to look up there, this scene is on the lower part of the roof right above the front door. At first he seemed to want to climb back up the drain pipe, but then he changed his mind and curled up in the corner. He was very still, this picture was taken with an exposure of 3.2 seconds (tripod in use). It was starting to get dark out, I didn't realize it but as I was shooting I'm sure my exposures were slowly climbing.

Eventually I took all the pictures I could and put away my gear and watched from inside the garage, through a dirty window that I'm hoping hid me but probably didn't. After a while he started cleaning himself, then walked over to the other side of the garage, apparently to see if anyone else was outside, then walked back over to the spot where this was taken and to the lower edge of the roof, near the gutter. This is where it gets weird. He waited there a while longer, long enough for me to go inside and watch from a window beside the front door. After a while I saw a paw poke down into my field of view. Then it was withdrawn. Then after a while another paw poked down. After a while the head poked down. It's like he was testing me, to see if it was safe to come down. Eventually he climbed down onto a small tree which is handy to climb down but does not appear to be needed for him to climb up. And then it was off on a night of foraging.

I probably should have been trying to scare him away, to put a negative association with people into his mind. But I just couldn't, I was too busy taking pictures and besides I just love raccoons. In truth I'm a sucker for most mammals, but raccoons especially can be so charismatic, at least in appearance if not always in demeanor. They could use a little streamlining, they look a little heavy and ungainly, but the way he climbed down onto the tree (first getting a grip on the end of a nearly vertical branch with his front feet, then lowing himself down vertically on the support of those front feet) shows that they're not quite as ungainly as they might look.

My next step is to try to catch him when he's climbing up the drainpipe in the morning. I might be able to hide in a position far enough away that I wouldn't stop him. I want to see how he does it. And then... I should probably start trying to deter him. I'm wondering if a full power camera flash in the face would work. I imagine it'd be unpleasant for a nocturnal creature, I mean it's unpleasant enough for me and my eyesight probably isn't near as good in the dark.

Depending upon how he climbs the pipe it might be possible to grease it. I still don't know how something that big can climb up something so smooth. I could see a squirrel doing it, but not a raccoon.

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For a minute I thought it would be a sort of stalkerish picture of the person living in the apartment above you. But this is much better. he is so cute.
 
"Dan" said:
My next step is to try to catch him when he's climbing up the drainpipe in the morning. I might be able to hide in a position far enough away that I wouldn't stop him. I want to see how he does it. And then... I should probably start trying to deter him. I'm wondering if a full power camera flash in the face would work. I imagine it'd be unpleasant for a nocturnal creature, I mean it's unpleasant enough for me and my eyesight probably isn't near as good in the dark.
Click to expand...

When I first read this I thought you meant 'catch him' as in CATCH him- which would be a very bad idea. :o

They are cute looking but very tuff critters. I saw one teach a very large agressive dog a nasty lesson once.
 
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I tend to use aggressive terms for photographic related things. I "shoot" things. I "catch" "targets".

In this case it was more like "caught him in the act" though.

And yes, I know they can be nasty. If he'd have gotten up and started running towards me I'd have run. My confidence was based on his apparently being either afraid of me or at least choosing to avoid me. I think we understand each other in that regard.

The thing that creeps me out is how they just stare at you. I was walking around the neighborhood at night once and suddenly noticed a raccoon in a tree. It was a small tree, I have no idea what it was doing up there. It was just sitting up there staring at me. No attempt to hide, no apparent plans to run. Just a stare that says "what are you looking at?" with a New York accent.
 
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Did you know that they LOVE Reese's Peanut Butter Cupsâ„¢?

Just got back from a weekend away with the family, and the racoons can open coolers. And they bypass the meat in them.

The other family on the first night woke up to scare them away, and one was sitting in my wife's camp chair, eating one. And it took a lot of motion towards him to scare him off. They were using the Reese's the night before as a replacement for chocolate in smore's....and they lost all of them to the racoons.
 
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Oh, so THAT'S what we should have been using in the traps! We were using catfood!

For a while we were trying to trap the raccoon or raccoons. From what we can tell they never touched the trap.
 
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They are very smart....the next night we put firewood on top of the coolers and when they came out they were chattering away angrily because they couldn't get back in them. So perhaps appealing to their sweet tooth would be good to get them into a trap to take them away someplace else.
 
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Alot of people down here feed them by hand - I've done it myself. Though like any wild animal, they can defend themselves fearsomely, and can always be a little bit unpredictable, in general they are quite trainable and can become very human-friendly and tame. Several parks down here are loaded with them, and they tell people all the time to stop feeding them, but they are so adept at standing up with really cute looks on their faces and reaching out with their little manipulative hands that people end up feeding them anyway. I fed one in my backyard for a few weeks after finding him stealing food from my squirrel feeder. I left out some cat food and he'd come each night to eat...I would just make myself more and more noticeable first in the dark behind the window, then with the lights on, then with the sliding door open, then sitting outside - until he was used to me. Eventually, he would walk right up to me, stand upright, and beg by flapping his front feet in the air.

I feed or hand-feed blue jays, squirrels, blackbirds, and lizards too...always enjoy interacting with nature!

And though immensely cute, raccoons can be a bit of a handful. Mine started taking to going for swims in my pool at night when I was asleep. He enjoyed the pool so much that he decided he wanted some toys in there with him, so he'd walk around the deck looking for things to put in the pool for fun - BBQ tongs, pool net, small plant pots, sprinkler heads...all of which were sitting at the bottom of the pool in the morning. I stayed up one night to confirm it was him doing it. I don't mind getting all the stuff out in the summer...but the pool's a bit nippy in the winter! They also love to knock over our trash cans and spew trash all over the driveway. So I started putting bungee cords across the lids...they'd knock the can over and roll it all over the front yard trying to get it open...but couldn't. I thought I won that battle until one got smart and figured out how to chew through the bungee (I would have loved to have seen the first time he managed to bite through and that thing snapped back with force - they probably ran 50 feet away and up a tree in fear!).

I finally had to buy vermon-proof cans, which have solid clamping handles that lock well over the lid - and are rectangular so they don't roll all over the place!

Still...gotta love them - just look at those faces!
 
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There used to be a restaurant by a marina near our house that regularly fed the racoons their table scraps. It became a real attraction for the patrons of the restaurant to sit out on the porch and watch the nightly feeding across the St. John's River. It all came to a sad end, though, when the marina burned down. I bet the coons all lost half of their large and pendulous body weight...
 
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