Rocky Bandito
Guess who was snooping around the garden early yesterday morning? Rocky Bandito, himself! Right out in plain sight, sniffing and snuffing and reconnoitering around the tool shed. The trouble was (at least from his point of view) – he was in the wrong part of the yard for finding a chicken breakfast. The girls were still tucked up snug and tight in their coop far, far away (in raccoon steps, that is.) If this was the coop-lurking practicum portion of his Chicken Thievery class, it’s an ‘F’ plain and simple.
He seemed in no hurry to leave the garden, though. He gave me plenty of time to grab my camera and take a couple of pictures before he ambled north and into to our neighbor’s yard. There’s a pretty inviting looking tree just beyond the fence that he and his family might be calling ‘home’ right now. Actually, Rocky could have been a ‘she’ for all I know. Rockette?
Since we knew that raccoons are mostly nocturnal, I went to the handy World Wide Web to find out if there might be a problem connected to a daytime sighting. On a website called “Raccoons in the Attic” (Yikes! Now there’s a thought I didn’t need), I found this information:
…although raccoons are primarily nocturnal… it is not at all unusual for a raccoon to be active in the middle of the day. They can’t just sleep from dawn to dusk without doing anything. They may go off in search of food or drink. This is especially true of nursing female raccoons, who have a bunch of babies to take care of, and who have extra nutritional requirements, because they are nursing their young. In the spring, you’re sure to see some mother raccoons gathering extra food during the daytime, so that they can produce more milk.
In the Lock-Up
I can’t vouch for that masked bandit being either male or female, but I can say that the ramparts of Farmer Nyel’s chicken coop were not breached. Nor was there any new evidence that an attempted entry had been made. Just to be on the safe side, however, there was no free-ranging yesterday. The girls were cooped up in their run all day, much to their disapproval and disgust.
“It’s for your own good,” I told them. But our short-legged feathered friends are no more interested in hearing that reason than any of the rest of us. Fortunately, their memories are short and they don’t hold grudges for very long. (Roosters are another story but, fortunately, we are rooster-less right now.) Hopefully, the Rocky Bandito family will move on, soon, and the girls can come out and enjoy their usual territory in safety.
Just for memorable laughs, I did have Madam Raccon make a nest in my attic. She ripped off shingles and made her entry. They are a protected species here and “friends of the raccoon” offered to come a build a tent over the hole so she could raise her family. Somehow they took priority over my three little girls? No babies had arrived yet so I climbed into the attic, chased her out, climbed on the roof and covered the hole.
Moral of the story – do not make friends with these cute guys. Keep them at a distance, and wait for them to move on.