Just as I was hitting the "send" button to post today's video link, I heard an unearthly sound outside…a screech of rage unlike anything I've ever heard from any of God's creatures. And it was going on and on…
I ran outside and there — in the middle of the street — there was some sort of frantic, whirling dervish. So help me, it looked like the Tasmanian Devil spinning about so fast you can't see who or what it is. The screech was still coming from whatever it was, and it was loud enough that other neighbors were coming out to see.
None of us could make out what it was…but it wasn't bothered by cars racing by. I live on a fairly busy street and even at this hour, autos were zooming past it, missing it by mere inches. But still the creature was screaming and spinning and spinning and screaming. Wishing I'd grabbed up my big flashlight on my way out, I ran towards the dervish and finally got close enough to see what it was.
It was two raccoons humping. Right there by the white line running down the boulevard.
I stopped about twelve feet from them and clapped my hands together. They stopped, looked at me and decided that whatever I wanted, it couldn't possibly be more important than what they were doing. They then went right back to humping.
I turned to a group of neighbors who weren't close enough to see what I'd seen. I said, "It's two raccoons humping in the street."
One lady asked, "Can't you stop them?"
I asked her, "Why? If they don't do it there, they're going to do it somewhere else. It's not like they're going to go check into a motel." By this time, the raccoons were done and I could see them slinking off to go find food or smoke a cigarette or whatever a raccoon does after sex.
I just looked it up and learned that the gestation period for raccoons is 63 days and then it usually takes about three weeks before the babies are old enough for the mother to take them out to forage for food. One night a few years ago, Carolyn and I spotted some quieter raccoons coupling on the roof outside my bedroom window…and it was about three months later that I spotted large families of them in my back yard.
In the last year or so, I've decided to discourage the raccoons from coming around. They're cute but they're also destructive and with so many feral cats around, as well as the possibility of disease, I decided to secure some of their routes and to not leave cat food out at night. For a while, I thought they'd gone elsewhere…but last week, I saw one that was about the size of a shopping cart, and now they're doing it in road. I have a feeling that around the end of April, I'll be chasing whole families of 'em away again.