Title: News From The Hillsdale Zoo
Tags: Wildlife, Raccoons
Blog Entry: Morning sibs, steps, cuzzes, pals et al...... Last night..... Being totally knackered, with legs swollen the size of oak tree trunks..... I headed upstairs and..... Crawled into bed leaving Marcel down here with his music playing..engrossed in the book he was reading... Not five minutes later I heard a noise... I thought it was BizzyBits trying to open the doors on the dry sink... Every once in a while she takes it into her head to go in there and nest... I sleepily told her to stop but the noise continued.. Turned on the light and the cat was on the end of the bed.. Turned off the light and went to the window... The patio is right beneath the two north windows in the bedroom and the live animal trap had been placed atop the patio wall weighted down with a step ladder... It was a clear moonlit night... And what to my wondering eyes did appear, but.... A huge raccoon inside the patio wall, and... What looked like another one in the trap... I went to the top of the stairs and told Marcel we caught one and returned to the window to watch... Marcel clanged out the patio door at which point the Giantess slowly and with great deliberation, waddled up and over the patio wall and disappeared out of line of sight among the spruce windbreak.. Marcel approached the trap and .... His voice rose... almost to a shriek! 'We've got THREE of them!' The tone of his voice was so funny I nearly fell out the second story window I was laughing so hard.... He grabbed the trap full of the trio of miscreants and headed for the car..... And wasn't even to the driveway before the Giantess came back to check for food. Marcel drove off with the trio in the back of the wagon... I went downstairs to wait for him. Twenty minutes later Marcel returns... Sets up the trap again... And doesn't even make it back to the den before the Giantess is back at the trap. She is so huge and with such long arms that she can fish the bait out of the bowl without setting off the gate trip. Bold as brass.....not at all wary of us! She's the one who keeps prying open the sunroom door. In fact.. When he went out before finally retiring to bang home the door... He met her on the patio right outside the door..break and enter being the obvious intent. We baited the trap three more times last night... The trap is still set this morning, and... The bait bowl is once again empty. Time for a change in tactics! Tonight the bait will be..... Not nice big chunks of meat in a bowl but..... Loose peanuts. Let's see if she can fish those out without tripping the gate. If that doesn't work? I'll wire a bone to the far end of the cage. I would imagine given her total lack of caution, that she is the one that was being fed by the lady across the highway all last summer. Once caught she will be going for a very long ride. Just further confirmation of my long held belief that wild animals should not be fed by humans... Learned behaviour patterns and a dependency on humans is not conducive to their ultimate long term survival. At that.. The four of them were lucky. While Marcel was taking the kits for their roadtrip..a gun went off about 2 blocks away in the north subdivision. One of their pals didn't endure so kind a fate. The count to date??? SEVEN. Three with one bait last night.. Two the night before.. Two single episodes in the previous week. We need SLEEP! But for now? Coffee and the news! And... That's all she wrote.
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