A Wild Night For Wildlife

As if mother nature took our order and delivered, I was talking with Susan earlier tonight about how we’ve seen our share of opossums and skunks and coyotes around the house but hadn’t ever had raccoons on the premises and all of a sudden in the middle of the hilarious The Minor Accomplishments of Jackie Woodman Ranger spied some movement along the roof line next door and went on tactical alert.

Must be opossums, we thought as we’d seem them there before. Then Susan called out there was a bunch of them.

And sure enough they weren’t (click the craptastic through-the-livingroom-window-glass snap to doublify):

raccoons.jpg

Turned out that in addition to the three pictured, there was a fourth in the tree off to the left. Eventually they all climbed up high into the tree, not at all bothered by me coming outside under it and blindly snapping off worthless point-and-shoot flash shots that didn’t catch anything but leaves and branches and the occasionally blurry pair of glowing eyes.

As if that weren’t enough, while I was downloading the images to the computer a few minutes later Susan called from the kitchen that there was a skunk in the backyard and we turned the big Q-Beam 1,000,000 candle-power flashlight on the beautiful creature and watched it mosey up and down the north fence probing for a way out. It finally exited unstressed via the passage the cats use to get into the north side garden.

Awesome.