Last year it was a fox I photographed from my living room window. This winter is was a raccoon. The day before I noticed prints in the snow on the patio and then it discovered the bird feeder. Nice try, bud.
Eventually it went all the way up another tree to the right of this one. It’s a little patch behind the other garage. It was probably 50 feet up. I never knew they’d climb so high. I have a couple of videos of it climbing and then getting itself situated. I’ll have to process and post them somewhere. After a while it came down and ambled off into the next lot. Funny little critter.
One damp and rainy spring, my sister found what we thought were kittens in a drainage ditch in front of our house in Illinois. We looked at them closely and realized they were not kittens. Our neighbor across the field taught biology, and that morning we asked him to look. They were baby raccoons. We took them in and bottle fed them for several weeks. As they got older and stronger, they moved outdoors, and soon enough wandered off to fend for themselves. As babies, they have a sort of trill (no idea if adults do), so I could imitate it, and I would go out in the woods, trilling, and they would come. Eventually we both grew up and apart, as people and raccoons do.
How fun!