February 2025 Racoon drama, signs of spring
Sunday February 2 Headed over to the Arboretum at dusk to meet up with Beth and her friend Judy to look for the great horned owls. Walking along the conifer path, we heard one hooting and headed that way. Saw a couple of people looking up at a tree, and there it was, perched on a branch near the trunk. We got a good look at it before it flew off. Following, we found it again, perched on an open branch, easy to see. Wonderful!
Monday February 3 A little snow fell overnight, making interesting patterns on the ice at the pond this morning.
And making the conifer path in the Arb a winter wonderland.
Wednesday February 5 On my way home from the pond this morning, I spotted a Cooper's hawk land on a post in a neighbor's front yard along my street. After a minute or so it swooped up to land in a tree and then took off over the rooftops.
Saturday February 8 Saw the mixed species flock again at the pond this morning: a couple of black-capped chickadees, a downy woodpecker, a red-bellied woodpecker, a white-breasted nuthatch, and a couple of tufted titmice, all probing the bark of a group of trees for insects. I liked the shadow that this tree made on the smooth surface of the snow on the pond this morning. (You can see my shadow to the left of the tree as I take the photo.)
Walking along Pond St. on my way back to the house I heard a downy woodpecker drumming; you can hear it on this video (but I didn't manage to capture the woodpecker). I've been hearing a woodpecker drumming in that area for a few days now. Both males and females drum to attract mates and claim territories: "looking for sex" as one of my birder friends says. A sign of spring coming!
After my pond walk, I went up to the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge at Plum Island, about an hour north of Boston, to look for snowy owls. Stopping at the Mass Audubon Joppa Flats visitor center just before the wildlife refuge, the woman at the front desk reported that there had been one flying around her neighborhood in Plum Island a couple of weeks ago. And then she told me that a few years ago, a barred owl flew down her chimney and perched on her mantlepiece; she even showed me a photo of it there, one eye half closed, dozing. Pretty amazing.
A beautiful, clear, mild day, with the sun gleaming off the snow. I checked all the usual areas - the boardwalks out to the dunes and ocean; the salt marsh on the opposite side of the road; the area around the Parker River by the maintenance shed; the area with the observation tower looking over the river. No luck. I talked to a number of other birders who were looking for them, but no one had seen one, so at least I felt that I hadn't missed one that someone else saw. The birding was pretty quiet: a few common goldeneyes in the river, a couple of Northern harriers flying over the marsh and a Cooper's hawk perched on a telephone pole just outside of the national wildlife refuge. It is a beautiful spot to spend a few hours, even without seeing a lot of birds. And it's fun to share birding stories with other birders.
Wednesday February 12 Morning sun at the pond, all frozen over. The ducks are long gone but the juvenile mute swan and a single Canada goose are still hanging around, curled up on the snow, bills tucked under their wings most of the time.
Friday February 14 We had a warm day and a tiny sliver of ice melted where the swan has been hanging out, so at least it's putting its bill in the water, getting something to eat.
Saturday February 15 On my way back from the Audubon Broadmoor sanctuary in Natick I stopped at a cafe by the Natick dam to get a biscotti and look out over the Charles River at a nearby little park. It's lovely, even in winter.
It all looked so peaceful. But soon things got dramatic. I kept hearing screeching and eventually found where it was coming from: a group of raccoons in a tree across the river from where I was standing. At first, I just saw one on a lower branch, then another came down from a broken off branch of the trunk (the left branch of the Y in the trunk), where it seemed to emerge from a hole in the tree, maybe a den. The second one went after the first, who cautiously worked its way down to the very thin tip of the branch and was swaying around as the pair of them squawked and screeched, grabbing at each other. At some point the aggressive one gave up and went back up to the den. A third raccoon appeared, working its way down another branch, near the first raccoon, and then the aggressive one came back out and had a spat with it, too, before heading back up to the broken off branch of the trunk. Here's the three of them; there was also a fourth on a high branch off to the right.
With the aggressive raccoon in the den, the first one then moved up to a higher branch. And almost as soon as it got settled there, the aggressive raccoon reappeared and went after it. They were tussling, grabbing each other, screeching, until the first raccoon was dangling and then fell to the ground, a drop of something like 25'. I thought it was going to die but it managed to get up and walk a few steps before either slipping or getting disoriented and falling down the retaining wall and into the river. Yikes. I don't know what happened to it at that point. It may have been carried downstream or it could have swum to a little inlet right near where it fell in. The aggressive raccoon worked its way down the tree and searched around the ground, maybe looking for the first. I drove around the corner to the little park with the tree they were in and a raccoon walked towards me for a bit before turning to walk across the snow and ice above the dam towards the opposite bank of the river. It looked pretty bedraggled and might have been the one that fell. A little later there were still two raccoons in the tree. Whew! I hadn't expected such drama! Just wanted to eat my biscotti and look out over the river.
After all that I went back to my original spot and heard yet more squawking from another tree further up the riverbank. And there was a raccoon hanging on to a droopy willow branch. A couple of minutes later, a second one appeared from somewhere higher up in the tree. Raccoons everywhere!
I think there must have been a female around, ready to mate. The Massachusetts Wildlife website says that raccoons mate from January to March and that the females are only receptive for three or four days, so the males are highly motivated to drive off any competing males and get down to business. Other websites said that males get very aggressive during mating season, with much screeching. And according to Mass. Wildlife raccoons "make a variety of sounds, from screams, hisses, growls, snarls, chatters, whimpers and even purrs." I didn't hear any purring.
And I can't resist adding a little mechanics to explain why the raccoon didn't die from its fall. Failure in materials, and damage to bodily tissues, depends not just on the force applied, but on the force divided by the area over which it's applied (the force/area is called the stress). For a body falling, the force is its weight, which is the average density of the tissues times the volume of the body, which depends on the body's length cubed. The area depends on length squared. So the force/area, or stress, increases with the length of the body: larger animals are subjected to larger stress than smaller animals when dropped from the same height. There's a memorable quote on this from JBS Haldane's 1926 essay "On Being the Right Size", in Harper's magazine:
"To the mouse and any smaller animal it [gravity] presents practically no dangers. You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes."
Reading Vanishing Treasures by Katherine Rundell, I found this quote about one very special raccoon:
"In 1906, a citizen of Mississippi sent the raccoon to the First Family in time to be cooked for Thanksgiving. Calvin Coolidge... instead kept her as a pet....Coolidge, the press reported, liked to have her in his study, sometimes draped around his neck, stroking her as he worked late into the night. And so she lived a life of luxury, until she did a thing many of her fellow Americans have dreamed of and very few achieved: she bit the President of the United States. At least, historians assume so: Coolidge was seen in public with a bandaged hand and Rebecca [the raccoon] was temporarily sent to the zoo."
Seems particularly appropriate at this political moment.
Sunday February 16 A neighbor emailed today to say that the juvenile mute swan at the pond was found dead this morning. I wasn't surprised, as it had been sitting on the ice for days, not able to eat. Still sad that it didn't make it. The neighbors think it was the last one from the nest at Ward's Pond over the summer; I think it's hard to know for sure.
Spent a little more time on the blue jay drawing from this week's class.
Tuesday February 18 Been hunkered down at home with a cold, so I did another drawing this morning, of a barred owl, from this photo:
 |
| Beth Beighlie |
And here is a very pregnant doe, looking like she's about to give birth soon.
Comments
Post a Comment