Footprints

[james_davis_nicoll]

When I left the place where I am feeding some cats to catch a bus at 6 PM, there was a thin layer of fresh snow. I noticed as I walked along that there were foot prints in the snow, fresh foot prints, clearly from a raccoon. In fact, they were so fresh that four of them still had a raccoon foot in them. The feet were connected to a raccoon that was in process of sharpening its claws on the post on someone's front porch and it looked it had been caught doing something that it was pretty sure it wasn't supposed to do. We contemplated each other for a while but decided to leave our acquaintance at that. I went to catch my bus and when I last saw it, it was strolling down the side-walk in the other direction.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

That's the same look I usually got from the raccoons that took over the garbage dumpster in my condo complex when I lived in Malden. The dumpster had a convenient sliding side door that was made of light plastic, and the raccoons found it trivial to open, which made the side door effectively unusable because there was always a raccoon rooting around in there. The management seemed to think that telling people to close the door in the fence would somehow keep them out. Eventually, the dumpster got replaced with one that had a heavy metal door on the side that took a lot of force to open, and that seemed to work better.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

All of our dumpsters have the plastic sliding door and I haven't seen any raccoons there. I know we have them down in the creek -- maybe they get enough food there. The cardboard recycling dumpsters at Public Works have the heavy metal doors and sometimes I can't open them.