ShawneeDispatch.com

I’m a great lover of nature, but only within certain limits.

Usually I try to be responsible in my limited interactions with all of God’s creatures. Oh, I admit I take a harder line with, say, mosquitoes or spiders or wasps, but generally speaking, I’m a live-and-let-live kind of guy.

I don’t go out of my way to aggravate the few wild creatures that coexist in my neck of the woods, so it just seems fair that you’d expect, if not cooperation or reciprocation, then at least a sort of neglect.

One of my “neighbors,” however, has taken it upon himself to throw down the gauntlet. After two or three years of intermittent combat of a sort – we never see each other – I’ve come to the conclusion it must be a raccoon. That’s the only indigenous critter I can think of that would have the strength, dexterity and overall vigor to practice the depredations he’s committed over the years.

The battle was joined three or four years ago, when we put a small water garden on our deck. I got a 100-gallon horse tank at a farm center, painted the outside and filled it with water. I put in a water lily and some other plants, and several fish to control the mosquito larvae.

I already had a fiberglass deck box about two feet square that I used to store barbecue supplies and such, and so I placed the fish food, which came in a heavy plastic sack, in there to keep it handy.

Well, it turned out to be even handier for the nighttime marauder, which promptly announced its presence by opening the lid to the box and ripping into the sack of food, which I found the next morning with its contents mostly emptied in the box.

I got a fairly heavy plastic container, the kind you use to store leftovers in, and put the food in that. The next morning I found the container, minus its lid, several feet away on the deck. Most of the fish food, except for a little scattered around the deck, was gone.

So the fish food went into the house. Problem solved. Except then I began to notice fish missing. We started out with two fish about six inches long and several others – four, I think – about half that size. First one or two of the smaller ones were gone, then one of the larger ones. By the time winter came they were all gone.

The next year it was the same, so the third year I gave up on the fish. But I missed having them, and so this year I put in more plant cover, so they’d have places to hide. This year we only got two fish, about five or six inches long. As of this morning, I still have at least one of them.

We also have several bird feeders on or near the deck, and they also have not escaped attention. I’ve tried to put out suet cakes, for example, but that’s been a losing battle. The suet cake, about three or four inches square and maybe an inch thick, goes in a heavy wire cage with about a quarter-inch mesh so the birds can get their beaks through to get at the food. The top is hinged with a spring clip. That was no match for the raccoon, though; he got that open after only one or two nights. So I wired it shut with a piece of baling wire. That meant that he consumed a cake of suet in two or three nights instead of one. So much for suet cakes.

We have a couple of tube-type seed feeders, and they’ve had quite a bit of traffic this summer. We noticed a lot of finches earlier in the year, with birds clustered around the feeders.

To keep up with the traffic, I started buying seed in 20-pound bags. Because I didn’t have room for those big bags in the kitchen, I got another deck box. This time I was prepared – I thought. I picked up a hasp at the hardware store and affixed it to the box.

I meant to get a D-ring or something like that to use in the hasp instead of a padlock, but it slipped my mind, so I fashioned a clip out of some clothes-hanger wire. Big mistake. The next morning I found the box open, the sack ripped apart. So, after another trip to the hardware store to procure the ring to lock the box, the seed was at last secure.

Nevertheless, we’ve still been using a lot of seed. One feeder that is on a wrought-iron arm that’s mounted to the deck has had to be filled each morning all summer long. I thought it was just the birds – I even wrote once earlier this year about how sometimes there were so many it reminded us of an Alfred Hitchcock film.

Then yesterday morning I had an epiphany, if that’s not too strong a term. I noticed that the empty feeder, which is essentially a tube about two inches in diameter and about 18 inches long, was tilted, resting on a branch of the crabapple tree that’s next to the deck. As I looked at it I realized two things: one, it was tilted at an angle as if it had been pushed over; no bird could do that. Two, it came to me that birds – at least the finches that frequent this feeder – are not nocturnal feeders. Ergo, my nighttime visitor has been chowing down all summer long at the bird feeder.

So I filled the feeder again, then moved it to another station, on a pole where it’s out of reach. When I checked it this morning, the level of seed was unchanged from last night.

So, the problem is solved. But just for now. I’m sure I haven’t heard the last of Br’er Raccoon.

Comments

1. 

   Matzo (anonymous) says…

   Seems like you are fighting yourself, not a coonie. To keep your fish safe you'll need to stretch a netting over the water at night. To save your birdseed? Bring the feeders in at night as birds sleep all night. None of the wildlife know you intend it for birds only.

   You can also spray cider vinegar around where you don't want the coonies to go.

   Raccoons are 3rd in intelligence according to Perdue University studies. They are far more adaptable than hoomans and it disgruntles the hoomans that they cannot outsmart them.

   Bring your free buffet in at night and the coonies will leave. It's your neglect not protecting these things, not the coonie's fault for accepting your generosity.

   Raccoon Orphanage
   http://doryandtheorphans.com

   September 16, 2009 at 7:41 a.m.

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