I Accidentally Adopted a Baby Raccoon
I got this app on my phone to identify birds, and it was all cool and fun until it became clear that there are precisely three birds in my general area: Sparrow, American Robin and Northern Cardinal. (Side: cardinals are cool and I think they’re great. Fat little red bastards). Yesterday morning I heard a new bird, and grabbed my phone to see what it was. Sparrow? That sounds nothing like a sparrow. This app is bullshit. Cornell will hear about this. I gave up and went back to work until I heard Jones going ballistic out front, and the bird noise getting louder and louder. Shit, he’s trying to kill it. I burst out the door, grabbed him and hurled him inside, and discovered that the bird app had not identified the noise because it was in fact a very distressed baby raccoon.
I figured it would go away so I went back to work. It continued to scrabble around and squeak. For the next three hours. So I went out the front to see what I could do about it, which was mostly stand about looking confused while a series of neighbours and passers-by stopped to chat about it. That was kind of nice, actually. It climbed up my door, sat on my mailbox.
After a while I managed to lure it down the side of the house with some cat food, where I have seen (full size) raccoons wandering about. Story over?
It’s very hot at the moment so I’ve been watering the plants at night so it doesn’t immediately evaporate. So at 10pm I go outside and am greeted by a familiar squeaking as my new friend runs towards me. This is now thirteen hours it’s been hanging around. It’s extemely adorable, very lost, and it’s very hard for me to not try and pet it.
I try and experiment and just leave and walk down the road, and behold, it skitters after me. It may think I’m its mother (I am not). Down a few houses, it finds a very interesting bin, while I’m in the middle of the road. A cat emerges and heads towards it, and a skunk appears behind me and runs across the road in the direction of the rest of the party, and at here at the height of my Trash Disney Princess moment I leg it home.
It has not yet returned.