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Really.
[It] begins in 1934, when a breeder asked the Reich Forestry Office, then led by future top Hitler aide Hermann Göring, for permission to release the masked-faced mammals to “enrich the local fauna” outside Kassel, a small city north of Frankfurt.Snipped: an account of the raccoons’ antics in the city of Kassel, which have mostly consisted of denning in attics and refusing to be driven out—common stuff for anyone who lives in a raccoon-rich environment. More noteworthy are their depredations in the Brandenburg winemaking area, where last year they ate up the whole grape harvest. See also: Nazi Raccoons Wipe Out Vineyards in Germany.“Raccoon pelts were a popular trophy for hunters back then,” biologist Ulf Hohmann said. “They were also raised for their fur at special farms” after they were imported from North America early last century.
Seventy years on, the furry critters are now as populous in some areas of Germany as in the major urban centers of North America—a whopping one per hectare (2.5 acres), Hohmann said.
Somewhere between 100,000 and one million raccoons are estimated to live in Germany, making them prime targets for hunters. Some 20,000 were shot during the last season, according to official statistics. But unfortunately for the denizens of a growing number of European capitals, they like cities.
Furry blitzkrieg?
Hundreds of thousands have fanned out to Belgium, Luxembourg, the Czech Republic and France. The news caught the ire of Britain’s Sun tabloid, which warned its readers that “Nazi raccoons” were “just across the Channel” and “on the warpath … in a furry blitzkrieg”.
Onward.
Since their introduction during the Third Reich, raccoons can trace their gradual conquest of Europe back to two other moments in history.As usual: You can’t make this stuff up.As Allied bombs rained over Berlin at the end of World War II, one struck a fur breeding farm, giving the raccoons there the opportunity to escape into the wild. They never looked back. And in the 1960s, NATO soldiers freed the raccoons they used as mascots after leaving their base in France, setting off a baby boom.
Hohmann says that in the coming years, raccoons are expected to spread to even more European cities.
“Kassel is just the beginning,” he said.
Addendum: as pointed out by AlyxL, and hailed with glee by Julia at Sisyphus Shrugged:
And what happens when the Nazi raccoons meet the Stalinist giant crabs? Easy call: they eat each other. And may the best omnivore win.
I was wondering who would be thoughtless enough to import raccoons.
Now I know.
If only someone had brought this up while the Nazis were coming into power...
"They say they'll bring order and stability? Well, there's only one party you can blame for your toppled trash, and it ain't the communists!"
Environmentalists have to be tearing their hair out.
The news caught the ire of Britain’s Sun tabloid, which warned its readers that “Nazi raccoons” were “just across the Channel”
In between tearing my hair out* I'm savoring the image of Bandit and Rascal hanging Cape-Fear-style from the undercarriage of a Eurostar train heading into Folkestone.
*I've grown it long just for that purpose. Easier on the RSI.
The "ate up the whole grape harvest" link in the post is broken (missing a trailing 'l').
Thank you, Richard Parker. It's all fixed now.
I thought, when first seeing the title, that the raccoons were one of the Nazis' "secret weapons."
You know, like the bats that Americans equipped with miniature incendiary bombs to nest in and set ablaze Tokyo during WW2. :)
It is one thing to introduce a nonnative and invasive species. It is quite another to introduce a nonnative invasive species with hands.
I've always believed the Nazis were idiots. To have this confirmed yet again provides a certain melancholy pleasure.
Let me add (given Teresa's comment at #4 above), the following note. The mongoose was introduced into Jamaica in the late nineteenth century by a planter named Espeut. The purpose was to predate on the rats that were eating Espeuts canes. The little weasel-like creatures, far from their origins in Indian fruitcake, discovered that chickens were much easier prey than rats.
The great grandson of the man who introduced them, Peter Espeut, is now one of the leading environmentalists in the Anglophone Caribbean. It seems to be, in part, his way of atoning for his ancestor's blunder.
Obviously these were not nazi raccoons, they were decent, freedom-loving, American raccoons, who went over as part of a covert plan to undo the Third Reich.
You know, sort of like that plan to bomb Japan...with bats.
D'oh! I see that Christian beat me to it
Who's to say that this isn't the last, and most long term, of the V weapons? The doodlebugs didn't shake us, but if the racoons out-compete the good old British fox, I'm not sure my morale will hold up.
Hey, the Japanese were sending killer balloons.
Fragano, same thing happened out here in Hawai'i. Mongeese imported to kill rats, but one's diurnal, the other's nocturnal. Never the twain do meet.
I actually see a family of mongeese which take up residence under my hedge occasionally.
When I showed Tom Womack around Fermilab, he enjoyed our billion-dollar superscience installations, but what really got him excited was seeing raccoons as we passed a dumpster.
I hadn't realized they didn't exist in the UK; he'd only heard about raccoons, never seen one.
If superscience doesn't exist at Fermi Labs, then where?
Bill, what do you know about this incident?
Sorry, Teresa... It's just that I got a kick out of an actual scientist using the term in this day and age. No disrespect was intended. Au contraire.
Four miles of liquid helium. The thunder of 750-kilovolt sparks. A torrent of ghostly neutrinos headed downward into the Earth toward Minnesota. A tower of light looming above the prairie. Two counter-rotating toroids, one of matter, the other of antimatter. Really high vacuums. Really fast computers. Stuff like that.
Tell me it's not superscience.
Plus, a lot of things around here are painted in Frank R. Paul colors.
There used to be barriers in the Channel Tunnel to keep out those damn foreign rabies-drenched animals that would have worked for this too, but apparently they took them out after noticing that, um, there really isn't any rabies in France either. (Although generations of British children were raised in TERROR of being bitten by one of the hordes of RABID ANIMALS while on holiday in France.)
Where I grew up, near the Norfolk Broads, they had recently finished eradicating coypu that had been breeding like, um... coypu, I guess. There was an organization called "Coypu Control" devoting to hunting them down and many jokes about giant guinea pigs.
There's also an enormous wallaby colony in Derbyshire. And of course the omnipresent grey squirrel is the classic British example of the invading American species. Over-nutted, over-sexed, and over here? Doesn't quite have the same ring to it.
Teresa, I was home asleep that night, but friends of mine were on the midnight crew that had to confront the assault.
First hamsters, now raccoons, eh?
Is ML taking upon itself the duty of chronicling the slow rise of the Despotism of the Cute and Furry?
(Anyone here remember Chad Oliver's story "King of the Hill" in ADV?)
Tell me it's not superscience.
Ah, but does it coruscate?
Of course, it is superscience, Bill. Like I posted to Teresa, no offense was intended. I'd better retire in the shadows of my lair now and wait until my social subroutines have rebooted.
(And I was very excited to start seeing raccoons when I moved from San Francisco to Oakland, which is I guess like being excited about seeing an extremely large rat if you're an American. We really didn't have raccoons in England. Promise.)
Heh.
Now if we *really* wanted to get something going, we could sneak a few coyotes over to prey on the raccoons....
(ducking and running)
Or oppossums to vie with the raccoons for resources, just as they do here in the Pacific NW.
Heh.
The raccoons are seeking Lebensraum!
Tell me it's not superscience.
It's not superscience.
Call me a cab.
You're a cab.
Greg "Ask and you shall receive" London
Sometimes all I can say is "My God, humans are stupid."
Unfortunately, raccoons aren't. Neither are the razorbacks people imported to Skagit county. Starlings are, but they make up for it by being rapacious omnivores which out-reproduce most native cavity nesting birds.
And don't get me started about ivy...
When the live-action "101 Dalmatians" came out in the late '90s, I had to go see it with my vet-tech animal-lover sister. It was set, of course, in England. The animal antics prominently featured ostensibly wild raccoons. Grrrrrrrrr.
Essentially, a major - and intentional - continuity error.
It was like nails on a chalkboard; like toucans or prehensile-tailed monkeys in African jungle movies; like the noble, lonely scream of a red-tail hawk as the foley for a bald eagle. Like redwoods and Douglas-firs in an East Coast story.
Do they think we don't know this stuff???
(Bald eagles sound like overgown chickens. Not properly uplifting or dignified.)
PS to JESR: we have *razorbacks*? Am I safe, away to the south around Northgate? Wanna come over to my new yard and help pull ivy?
PPS to everyone in North America: please join my new trend for starling-feather capelets. Surely we must be able to trap *just* starlings somehow.
Starlings? Are those like grackles? Because I *hate* grackles.
JESR: Or (good-lord-what-were-they-thinking) Japanese Knotweed. That one gets my dad started every time.
re: the British and rabies, you know where else doesn't have any rabies? California. Know what separates California from the rest of rabies infested North America? Nothing, absolutely nothing. Stupid! You so stupid!
(Sorry, UHF flashbacks)
Apropos of the last paragraph, i.e. nothing, I remember hearing raccoons fight in my backyard in Palo Alto. Freaked my cats out.
Speaking of cats, I found out about California not having rabies when I went to the vet shortly after arriving in the state to give my pets their annual rabies shot. My vet recommended against rabies vaccination since the last case of rabies in california was in 1972 and the vaccine had been correlated with some sort of feline leukemia.
In other news, as a resident of a German city I can't say I'm exactly looking forward to a raccoon invasion...
TexAnne: Naw, grackles are in the corvidae, so they're much smarter and more resourceful. (And more raucous, I think.)
#20 Bill Higgins: I've got a new desktop picture on my computer now.
As far as transplanting animals and such, I just hope no one ever gets some kind of great idea to import poisonous snakes to Rhode Island. We don't have any now, and I'm sure there are better ways to get rid of rats. Like all those feral cats we have!
Bill Higgins (20): Ooooh, shiny! What is it?
TexAnne @32,
European starlings were introduced to North America by an idiot who thought it a grand idea to bring here all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare. (Good thing he didn't also want to bring the mammals- tigers in Central Park, anyone?)
They're like locusts, if locusts could contaminate granaries with droppings, and eat all the food out of feedlots.
Here's a picture of a Starling's nest. If you like starlings, only look at the first 3 pictures. If you don't like starlings, look at all 4 pictures. Yay nature.
Kudzu. Kudzu. Definitely kudzu. You can actually see it grow on hot summer days.
Nick Fagerlund @ #35 - Grackles are not corvids. They are icterids, in the same family as North American blacbirds, orioles, meadowlarks, and cowbirds. (European blackbirds are Turdus thrushes, like American robins.)
Ben @ #13 - Around here, red foxes coexist with raccoons, coyotes, gray foxes, skunks, opossums, and the occasional bobcat. They seem to all be doing fine. Not to say that things would go as well if raccoons invade Britain.
Supposedly we had a few emu running around Shawnee State Forest for a while. I don't know if they made it through the subsequent winter. The red foxes, grey foxes, possums et al may have et emu.
Dang it. If only I'd been a few minutes earlier, I would have made the kudzu comment.
>> Superscience
Could I at least know what kind of soup before I choose?
Actually, raccoons have been known to kill the dogs folk use to hunt them. A 'coon can drop out of a tree on a dog's head easy. That's why you hunt with a pack of dogs if you can borrow from your neighbors. Although if you use a Plott rather than a Walker hound, the odds shift somewhat in the hound's favor - they're bigger dogs. Coyotes are, I 'spect, too smart to go near a 'coon.
Incidentally:
mongeese
It's "mongooses". Really. Nothing to do with the birds. ("Mongoose" was previously spelled "mangus", if memory serves.)
Steff,
I've got my own ivy, which is seeded in the woods by birds (including starlings); I have to pull it, and Prunus laurocerus, and English Holly, as well as bedamned Himalya blackberries (which, I'm sorry, Kudzu dies back to the ground every winter, right?) and Tansy Ragwort, which has the extra fun quality of being poisonous to cattle.
The razorbacks seem to be limited to the area around Arlington, where they were originally imported by the same group of Appalachian immigrants which included Mooney and Loretta Lynn; the Washington State Department of Game hunts them twice a year to keep it so.
I'm going to stop before I even mention starlings. Because I'd never stop.
Nick, luckily, Japanese Knotweed seems to hate where we live; the nearest patch is over on Carpenter Road. I think people were thinking the same thing they thought when they planted Purple Loostrife: it's pretty and easy to grow. Of course I'm now an ex post facto scofflaw, as I've got two huge Buddleias (butterfly bush) which were declared noxious plants well after my two became part of my privacy screen.
Could be worse; my cousin feeds Eastern Gray Squirrels, and some of my neighbors put out dog food for the coyotes.
Will it rain on too many parades if I say that a few years back I saw a rabid raccoon in San Francisco. Rabies is considered endemic in skunks and raccoons in California; I have no idea where the notion it doesn't exist in the state came from.
Introduced animals taking over are nothing new. If I drive around Central Oregon where I live now the animals I am most likely to see are sheep, llamas, cows, buffalo, wild turkey, and deer. Only deer are native to Oregon. Not to mention that the dense flocks of geese, which are particularly fond of cemeteries, never existed in such quantities or spent the whole year here before human changes to the environment.
"Naw, grackles are in the corvidae..."
Actually grackles are not corvids, although I think they are quite as lovely anyway. They are members of the Quiscalus family
Even though large tracts of Europe, and many old and famous states, have fallen, or may fall, into the grip of the masked bandits, and all the hideous apparatus of compulsive food-washing, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight on the Sainsburys and the Tescos. We shall fight on the orchards and the market-halls. We shall fight, with growing scents and growing condiments, in the air. We shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight with our squirrels. We shall fight with our hamsters. We shall fight with our gerbils and guinea-pigs. We shall never surrender.
And even if this Island were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, infected and inhabited by the British tourist, would have the same trouble; until the Old World, with all its foxes and its stoats, should step forth to the rescue and the deracooning* of the Old.
*Obviously, the Grand Old Man had deracoonian measures in mind.
I feel a bit of an idiot over planting an exotic - I put Mexican petunias in the yard, even though I knew they were incredibly hard to uproot and liked taking over territory, because I wanted something that would look decent without any attention. Now the beautiful little creek area/ nature reserve down the road is being overrun by them, although hopefully they didn't migrate from my yard, and I feel guilty every time I see them that I didn't go for a native plant instead.
Has anyone ever seen raccoons use their hands as hands? As in, say, grasp with their fingers, or pull things apart, or open things?
Because a family of them lives near me, and since I put kibble out (for them and for the neighborhood homeless cats) I frequently get a chance to watch them. And all I've seen them use their hands for is to pull food towards them like someone hauling in poker chips, and cup food between their palms to lift it to their mouths. They don't have opposable thumbs, of course, but they don't seem to use their fingers the same way primates do. (Contrary to folklore, I've also never seen them wash anything before they eat it - and I keep one of those self-refilling water dishes outside, so it's there if they wanted to do that.)
Maybe domesticated raccoons figure it out by watching humans?
Well, I didn't actually see them do it, but I did find the results of a couple of raccoons who opened a cooler left by my grandparents at a campsite one time. They opened the cooler latch to get inside and ripped open the bag of Oreos and ate all of them. They left the marshmallows.
#16 ::: Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey wrote:
When I showed Tom Womack around Fermilab, he enjoyed our billion-dollar superscience installations, but what really got him excited was seeing raccoons as we passed a dumpster.
I hadn't realized they didn't exist in the UK; he'd only heard about raccoons, never seen one.
That's reminding me of watching some visiting europeans coo over the racoons on my back deck, while the locals winced, and tried to make sure they didn't feed them while they were at it. Pfeh. Between the squirrels and the racoons, I've got running water in the upstairs bedroom...
#31 ::: Steff Z ::: winced:
It was like nails on a chalkboard; like toucans or prehensile-tailed monkeys in African jungle movies; like the noble, lonely scream of a red-tail hawk as the foley for a bald eagle. Like redwoods and Douglas-firs in an East Coast story.
Do they think we don't know this stuff???
... or like blue eyed, full blood japanese?
On the subject of raccoons, there's a woman on flickr (yep, here I go with flickr again...) who has a whole family of semi-domesticated raccoons. Some of her pictures are quite amazing.
James @ 34:
California definitely has a rabies problem. Here are reports of human deaths from rabies trasmitted from bats in 1995, 2002, and 2003. I have no idea how your vet formed a contrary opinion -- my vet would strongly disagree.
And don't get me started about some of the stupid things I keep hearing about sylvan plague.
Anne and Barry, 40 and 47: Egg on my beak; you're right. I suspect myself of confusing them with jays or something. Arg.
Re Cassie @ #9: It is one thing to introduce a nonnative and invasive species. It is quite another to introduce a nonnative invasive species with hands.
Invasive non-natives with hands? Isn't that the definition of human?
The universal dislike of invading non-natives with hands should be considered carefully before embarking on any invasion. It explains so much...
Paul @ #43,
I've been going back and forth on mongeese v. mongooses for two years, since they first started appearing in my yard. I've even used mongoose as plural. What I'm sayin' is, I'm no authority.
Hawai'i is very concerned about rabies, what with our rat population. We've kept the disease out so far; up until a year or so ago we even demanded that pets be quarantined for 120 days after their arrival on island, just to ensure they didn't have it. With changes in technology and vaccines, that's changed. Now if you can show proof that your pet has been vaccinated and otherwise shows no indication of rabies you can bring it straight in.
Claude, the vet may have been considering only reports of rabies in domesticated pets.
A local SPCA worker made the same jump in logic just recently; they fostered a dog with behaviour problems to friends for the weekend. The dog nipped, breaking A—'s skin. When A— asked the SPCA worker if the dog was vaccinated for rabies, she was told no, that there's no rabies here.
Which is nonsense. Rabies has been reported in raccoons, squirrels, bats, skunks, etc, locally for many years. Three years ago it was so widespread there were warnings posted not to even think about interacting with any 'wild' creature that didn't show fear, and this in parks where they mostly exhibit fear that you've not brought the kind of nuts they like.
So anyway, there's maybe different stats being kept and circulated and confused.
#50 CaseyL - First off... I'm glad I'm not the only one feeding whatever is brave enough to come into my back yard. We have 'coons, 'possum, squirrels, feral cats, rats and crows at our feeding stations and all of whom (except the squirrels) love Meow Mix.
We've watched our furry bandits use their hands more times and in more ways than I can count. Even without thumbs they seem to be almost as dexterous(sp?) as we are. They are smart enough to get the idea of a sliding deck door, and have used those little hands in an attempt to pry the door wider several times when I've been feeding them out a barely open door.
I pity those who don't see the beauty of these creatures, especially the raccoons (and yes, Anne, even the Grackles)...
Note to anyone who condones, advocates or practices live leg trapping on "pest" creatures: The Chinese have 9000 Hells in their mythology. You are cordially invited to find the one least pleasant to you, and rot there.
Pericat, up here rabies is primarily a bat problem; a friend of mine and his son ended up having to get a series of shots the same summer that Governor Locke's children were exposed.
Unfortunately, racoons are fearless around humans as a default behavior; when rabid they are very aggressive. Which scares the heck out of me, because somewhere in the briar patch of Himalyas that's covered three sides of my barn there's a raccoon. Or several.
I suppose it's too much to hope that the Nazi racoons might eventually meet in a spectacular battle with the giant Stalinist crabs in the Norwegian Sea?
While possums have more teeth than a raccoon (nothing like having one snarl into your face from two feet away while you're doing the laundry in the basement) I bet on the coon any day, nasty little barstuds that they are. I've had three different cats killed by raccoons, each time being a week or so after we'd had the cat fixed. This ads up to real money, and real depression over what's happened to the cat. Grumble.
Better raccoons then skunks, any day. At least when a raccoon is turned into road pizza it doesn't stink up the entire neighborhood.
What amazes me are the coyotes around here (Portland, Oregon). I saw one a few nights ago running down a street in a residential neighborhood while walking a stray dog we'd temporarily taken in. It ran into someone's backyard upon seeing me. Just one more reason to tell people to keep their cats inside, and make sure their small dogs are supervised at all times outdoors.
The raccoons native to the North West are the biggest subspecies, too. They can weigh 30lbs or more, and take on a black bear. Coyotes steer well clear of them.
I tell you what, if the UK and Europe promise to take back the starlings, we'll take back the raccoons and gray squirrels. Any takers?
Has anyone ever seen raccoons use their hands as hands? As in, say, grasp with their fingers, or pull things apart, or open things?
I didn't see the raccoon open the zipper on my backpack and pull the bag of M&M's out, but the pack was shut first, then open. Unless you have a convincing argument about telekenesis or very clever tongues, we'll go with the hands. (That was the day I learned to dangle my food bag from a tree, on a rope, even if there weren't big bears about.)
What I miss us opossums, which I used to see waddling around the early morning streets of Oakland like vast white rats. I imagine I would miss them less had I been a homeowner at the time.
The UK does indeed have rabies -- a bat conservationist died after being bitten by a rabid bat in 2002. However, the bats are notably non-aggressive and don't usually interact with humans, which is why it went unnoticed for so long.
Weirdly, the common house starling seems to be an endangered species. You used to see great swirling flocks of them at sunset, but their population seems to have crashed in the past couple of decades, probably due to changes in farming practice and a reduction in readily accessible food supplies in cities.
Raccoons ...
Has anyone ever tried breeding them for domesticity? I can see certain advantages to having a smart, trainable house pet with hands.
The BBC famously made a documentary on the urban foxes in Bristol. About a year before the population crashed as a consequence of overcrowding and disease.
One thing is that predators tend not to predate other predators: there's too much chance of getting badly hurt. It's not a certainty, though.
abi @ 65... What I miss us opossums, which I used to see waddling around the early morning streets of Oakland like vast white rats.
There were quite a few possums in Concord (*). I never saw one play possum, except for the one who did such a good job at it because it actually was dead. I came across one in the very early morning hours as I was bicycling to the train station. I remember a pale shape ambling around in the middle of the street, only a few feet away, but it was dark enough that I didn't get a good look. I knew it was a possum because otherwise it'd have to be a giant wiener, or a rat who'd mutated from gnawing at the missile silos not far from there.
(*) aka the hometown of Tom Hanks, further inland, for those who don't know the layout of the Bay Area.
Cassie @ 9... It is one thing to introduce a nonnative and invasive species. It is quite another to introduce a nonnative invasive species with hands.
Someone actually introduced a species using their own hands?
giant Stalinist crabs
RIIIIIIIIIIIDGE RACER!
In New Zealand they introduced Possums from Australia to establish a fur trade. Of course, until the Maori arrived New Zealand didn't have any mammals at all (except Bats. And Seals and Sea Lions. And Dolphins and Whales. But that's it.) Supposedly that't what the NZ Department of Conservation is aiming for: first remove the possums and rats, then the deer and wild pigs, then the sheep, cattle, cats and dogs, and finally the people.
Or so I was told when I was there.
After all they don't want any recreation of what happened when the Romans (or maybe the Normans) introduced rabbits into Britain.
Raccoons, I'm told, are nocturnal when healthy; if you see one active in daylight, steer clear and call Animal Control: there's a good chance it's rabid.
While I'm sure 'mongooses' is the correct plural, 'mongeese' is so much more fun that I'm going to use it from now on. But then you're reading a guy who calls one Kleenex™ a kleenek, then turns around and calls several of them kleenices. This is about equally a fun-with-words thing and a fuck-your-trademark thing.
And Neil #71: It's sure too bad the Normans came to Britain at all. Actually, the problems of that beknighted* isle go back even further: Saxons out of Britain! Britain for the Celts! Or...whoever was there before, Picts or Fair Folk or whatever. Slogans fail me.
*Yes, I do know.
I believe the Beaker People were nothing more than a bunch of parvenu imperialists, too.
Re rabid raccoons: I've tended to take raccoons as just part of the urban population, and was somewhat startled to hear, some years ago, of a rabid raccoon trapped three blocks from my home. I also read that the Northeastern U.S. raccoon population, which had been rabies-free, was reinfected after some idiot transported raccoons from another region so he could shoot at them, without checking their health. (A foolish idea anyhow: if you want to hunt coons, and you and the coons are in Virginia, why not do the deed at home? It's not as though New York State has more generous gun laws.)
Charlie (@ 66): I'm sure we could spare you a few (hundred thousand) starlings to re-establish a British population, once you get the habitat sorted out.
Xopher, quite so. Send the Saxons back to Saxony!
(Sadly, Kassel and Frankfurt are in Hessen rather than Saxony, which defeats my clever plan to bring the conversation full circle).
"Has anyone ever tried breeding them for domesticity? I can see certain advantages to having a smart, trainable house pet with hands."
They're small bears. I have my doubts.
With regard to raccoons in the UK, I met a cryptozoologist* a while ago who told me he and his colleagues reckon there are indeed established and breeding populations tucked away here and there in remote areas, on account of the occasional sightings and road-kill findings being too frequent to be convincingly explained by zoo escapes and pet releases.
*as far as I gathered, cryptozoologists do the following:
determining a particular small insignificant brown bird on an Indonesian island is a different species to the small insignificant brown bird on the next island over;
investigating the spread of non-native species
finding creatures that have been thought extinct for years;
finding creatures entirely new to science, including quite big ones, not just bugs;
searching for things like the Yeti and/or Sasquatch;
developing fabulous theories to explain mankind's prediliction for myths about dragons and the like.
As you might expect, the conversation got increasingly surreal. I will happily explain The Universal Monster Template theory to anyone who buys me a drink at a convention.
Also doubtful of the advantages of training raccoons to be helper monkeys - I can't help but imagine strange nocturnal murders and enslaved humans. In fact, are you sure the raccoons didn't put the idea in your head in the first place, Charlie?
JESR, I share your views on ivy. I was thinking
of tac nukes, myself.
My parents had a story about camping at Big Basin Park, back around 1959, and returning from a hike to find raccoons rolling apples down the slope to the nearby stream. The other couple was exclaiming over the cuteness of the coons ... until they discovered it was their food the coons has gotten into (threw all the stuff out of the box, just to get at the apples). After that they used better containers.
Linkmeister #15: They can be a real nuisance. I'd no idea they'd been introduced into Hawaii as well. One big problem in the Caribbean is that, small as they are, they instantly became the top predators because there were none larger than than them.
Juliet @ 78:
I will happily explain The Universal Monster Template theory to anyone who buys me a drink at a convention.
You're on. One question though, will it work with MS Word?
CaseyL@50: Has anyone ever seen raccoons use their hands as hands? As in, say, grasp with their fingers, or pull things apart, or open things?
Yes, all of the above. I've also seen them catch and eat frogs with their hands, and hold other food as they "wash" and eat it.
Has anybody ever written a story where, maybe as a background detail, raccoons were genetically engineered to be part of a starship's crew, and would be especially useful in really tight spots of the engine room, or in their own Jefferies Tubes? It is a rather obvious idea.
I can't help being thinking that a cryptozoologist ought to be someone who didn't know they were a zoologist. That's not much stranger.
Thanks for all the replies! Now I'm thinking of putting some kibble out in zip-lock baggies, or in boxes, to see if Mama and her kids can figure it out :)
Seriously, I wonder how much of what raccoons do and don't do is because they don't need to, or never saw it, or even variability in local customs. ("Bandit! Stop that! Only those striped-trash sorts from the country chew the box open. Remember your manners, and open it with your hands!")
Oh, yeah, Fragano, they're here, alright.
Xopher #72: I think raccoons are crepuscular, not strictly nocturnal; i.e., active pre-sunrise as well as post-sundown. And urban 'coons might be involuntarily active during full daylight, if they're disturbed by traffic or construction or anything else that rousts them from their den.
Garlic mustard. Alliari patiolaris. Goddamned garlic mustard, taking over the eastern woodlands from Canada south, driving out trillium, hepatica, bloodroot because deer won't eat it but eat it's neighbors, scuffing up the ground to receive the viable-for-5-years-seeds, though it can sprout from the taproot. And do NOT tell me "you can eat it!" You wouldn't die of the experience, sure, but if it tasted good the deer would have cleaned it out.
The proof that it is evil is that it is everywhere, yet people say vaguely "oh...I don't think I've ever seen it." However, to continue the parallel, just because you can't get rid of all of it doesn't mean you shouldn't fight the ones you see. (Did I mention that the taproot does a right-angled turn at ground level, so if you pull carelessly the -- stinking -- stalk comes off in your hand, leaving the root?)
Garlic mustard. Ptagh.
Charlie Stross @ 66-- I can see certain advantages to having a smart, trainable house pet with hands.
You have clearly never owned a polydactyl cat.
Hey! I just* saw a red fox in my back yard! In Washington, DC! In broad daylight! I'm getting used to hosta-eating deer, but foxes? This is ridiculous.
*Well, actually, it was Thursday afternoon. But the Demerol had fully worn off...
One of my friends lives in a somewhat sylvan area of Nashville. They kept finding cat food and peanut butter missing from the pantry (upstairs) and, being technologically adept, set up a motion-sensitive video camera outside the pantry. They caught mama raccoon and her six babies (all six!), presumably coming in through the cat flap in the basement, trooping up the stairs together, and opening jars of peanut butter (although not closing them back up), or opening large Tupperware bins of kitty food. So yes, they do definitely use them as hands.
W/r/t domesticating them: It's a bad idea on a number of grounds, but I know someone who had a raccoon with rheumatoid arthritis, brought into a wildlife hospital as a baby and deemed unreleasable, that kept him at home and used him as an education animal throughout his life. With constant, attentive, affectionate care, he (mostly) liked his owner and would barely tolerate, or sometimes charge to attack, any unrecognized human. He was quite bribe-able with grapes, however.
They are affectionate and sweet as babies but tend to become highly aggressive when they hit puberty. I don't know whether neutering would help (though I doubt it would hurt). The females are somewhat less aggressive but still very difficult to socialize. This is as opposed to oppossums, which in my experience have been sweet-tempered, docile, and playful throughout their lives (I'm not kidding. they're adorable, and make very very loyal pets. Not a particularly long life span, but fun while they're around; much like a rat, but less spastic and somewhat less likely to fry themselves investigating inappropriate electrical objects.)
Actually, I fear the outcome of Strauss' release of the neo-wankers along the Potomac. The critters are especially disgusting as they bring down young bucks, leave it for weeks, feast on the rotted meat then regularly soil themselves. It gets so bad in the summer heat that everyone vacates the city in August.
Ten or fifteen years ago, I started seeing patches of beautiful, dramatically colored flowers in gravel areas here in Kodiak, Alaska. They had long black stems, blackish-green leaves, and chrysanthemum-like flowers that were colored exactly like a burning ember. Gorgeous! People took them and planted them in their yards. I called them emberflowers because I didn't know what they were. I thought that they were growing from buried seeds recently turned up by construction because that has happened before, sometimes with seeds buried since the volcanic ash fall of 1912.
There is now a desperate campaign to get rid of this stuff. It's an invasive hawkweed. Nothing eats it. Its big flat leaves cover the ground, keeping everything else from growing. If you cut it, it regrows from the roots. If you pull it up, it regrows from root fragments. And it's been found inside the National Wildlife Refuge . . . .
Boy, do I feel stupid now.
Varias's description of a pet raccoon sounds a lot like a neighbor's beast. When I visited their house, I stood on chairs so "Pappoose" couldn't get at me. Once he got out, cornered me on my back door step, and bit me on the foot.
#64: There are coyotes living on the grounds of the Intel plant across the street. I've seen them on a few occasions, after dark or early in the morning. A neighbor says he's seen them in the apartment complex in the wee hours, checking out dumpsters.
On raccoons,
Yes, they eat cat food:
My great-aunt was feeding a feral cat by putting food on her back porch. The local raccoons got used to stopping by for the food. After a while, that cat was caught (or otherwise ended the food visits), and so it was time to stop the cat food.
The day she stopped putting food out, the raccoons immediately climbed up to the kitchen window and began to knock. Insistently. Imagine several 25 pound creatures tapping and watching, tapping and watching- that's why she started putting the food out again.*
But, they'll also eat...
Last year, the extended rains and cool temperatures delayed all the stone fruit crop. The local raccoons rely on fruit for food that time of year. They were hungry. Not only did they become more aggressive in taking cat food, they started eating cats.
Omnivores are clever, adaptable and easily bored. Feeding raccoons is like feeding bears, not birds.
As to mentioning the comet yet again-- how often do you get to see a comet in midday? Couple of times a century, maybe. McNaught is at perihelion and is brighter than Venus ever gets (-5). The east coast's sunset is soon, so carefully, carefully go look now.
* reducing the volume each day, but slowly.
Our friend Lea grew up in northern Louisianna, where the older raccoons would deal with dogs by running out on a log in a stream. When the dogs tried to follow, they'd push their heads under and drown them.
Bracken. It's a nuisance in California, it's a nuisance in Scotland.
Also in California, along the coast south of the Bay Area, pampas grass is the universal marker for disturbed soil. Once you disrupt the ecosystem, they spring up rather like triffids.
Here in Scotland, there is an extensive and unsuccessful effort to eradicate rhododendra that have escaped into the wild. I suspect, like Californians with eucalyptus (thank you, Jack London), they will eventually give up.
Also a problem in the Bay Area is Oxalis pes caprae (aka Demon Buttercup, Oxalis pestilence, Sourhellgrass, 3-leaf doom clover)
An import from South Africa, each plant has a main bulb and produces many tiny bulblets in its growing season. It crowds out everything else shorter than 12 inches.
Chickens will eat the bulbs, but that'll cause oxalate poisoning. Pulling leaves the main bulb in the soil. Digging gets the main bulb, and spreads the little bulbs further. Solarizing or roundup clears them for a season, and then they reseed from the neighbors' yards.
Evil, evil, evil, and it's now in my mulch pile. My necessary mulch pile, because living on a sand dune means the starting tilth of the soil isn't so hot.
Serge #84: Not that I recall, but consider the 'watchmakers' in The Mote in God's Eye which do seem to have been based on raccoons.
Linkmeister #87:
Slide, mongoose, dog know your name.
Mongoose sneak inna Bedward kitchen,
T'ief out wan o' him righteous chicken.
Slide Mongoose.
Kevin Hayden #93: Straussian wankers, unfortunately, are not an endangered species.
Regarding rhododendrons in the British Isles: I've been following the self-reintroduction of wild boar in the south of England with interest. It turns out that they find rhododendrons delicious. Who knew?
And regarding wildlife at Dumpsters: I can beat all of you pikers with three words, to wit:
Ursus arctos middendorffi.
Ha!
Possums, as was said above, were introduced for a fur trade. They then got out of control, and now eat native trees, birds, anything they can get their furry little faces into.
So, these days, in NZ, possums are regarded as the scum of the earth. If you see a sheep crossing the road, you swerve out the way. If you see a possum, you swerve to hit.
However, in Australia, the possum is a protected species. This leads to some odd mismatches when watching cross-Tasman nature documentaries.
Also, every now and again you get some idiot environmentalist from overseas who rants about how evil possum fur is, until someone has a quiet word in their ear.
I will second platedlizard on the huge friggin' raccoons we get in Portland, OR--and they are indeed crepuscular, as I work the graveyard shift and see them, every workday, at the beginning and end.
I've heard stories of coyotes in inner Southeast, which, to non-residents, is a dense residential neighborhood close to the middle of the city. Still, I used to come from rural Oregon, and we'd get cougars roaming neighborhoods, some summers. There is nothing, I tell you, nothing, like being a teenager and realizing you're being stalked by a Big Cat.
Then, though, speaking of invasive species, Oregon's got nutria. And they infest the waterways, and I know I've seen 'em get the size of small dogs--and not the smallest small dogs, either. Something about a rat the size of a beaver--yeah, I know, beavers are rodents, too--is a hell of a lot more intimidating than a skunk or porcupine. You should see the teeth on 'em.
I'll second the Himalayan blackberry, too, at that. You have to remove the taproots with a pickaxe. I sued to work in an invasive-species-removal program for the parks service, and it's brutal labor on anything like a large scale.
And thank you, way upthread, for pointing out the red-tailed-hawk-scream-as-foley-for-bald-eagles thing. That drives me crazy, and nobody ever believes me when I insist it's so.
JESR, #30, I have volunteer ivy under my kitchen window and I much prefer it to the three azaleas that were there before. Since I own a condo, someone else chops off the tentacles.
Steff Z, #31, Disney seems to put mooses in most of its animated movies, including Pocahontas. We don't have meese in Virginia.
theophylact, #91, I live in Manassas and we have foxes (and deer and such) in a small strip of woods behind the condos.
Marilee, we used to have a volunteer palm in the middle of a coral tree.
Fragano @ 100... Actually, as I wrote that post about starships and genetically engineered raccoons, I did find myself thinking back to The Mote in God's Eye. The creatures in that book were alien though. Still, yes, same basic idea. Darn. Niven and Pournelle beat me to it.
TexAnne #32: I think the grackles keep the starlings out of Texas. I've seen one or two starlings here, but they're rare enough to be notable. In Tennessee, they're everywhere.
Paul #43: If I can't have mongeese, I will argue strenuously for "mongoose" being its own plural! :-)
Dave #48: You owe me a new keyboard! "Deraccoonian"...
Charlie #66: "Domesticated" does not necessarily mean "trainable". For the latter, you generally need an animal with a herding or pack instinct. Raccoons, as someone else mentioned, would be more like cats -- better at training their owners than at being trained themselves.
Juliet #78: You're on. What cons do you generally attend?
FWIW, the large bush outside our front window seems to have become the local Sparrowbucks. And while sparrows aren't as loud individually as either grackles or American robins, when there are 40 or 50 of them all talking at once, the result is... noticeable.
And I noticed recently that our Barn Owl is back on the southeast corner of the house. He's a fall-spring visitor, I know the species because I have heard him when my windows were open, they have a peculiar vocalization.
And the white spatters on my deck will weather out by May. The pellets disorganize as they weather and blow away (well except for the one it left on the porch rail.... under the porch ceiling, can't figure that one out unless maybe it was raining and it decided to take it's leisure in the dry).
Speaking of ivy, I have just put in a bid on a house previously belonging to an elderly couple who didn't invest much in gardening. The entire front yard is ivy. With some climbing 15 feet up the large evergreen in the middle of the yard, too. Any guidelines for eradication will be welcomed!
They're in the trees too:
little light, I do believe (consulting the garden book) that 'Himalaya' is for whatever reason the name of the blackberry. It's still a pain to deal with (I've seen the thorns on wild blackberries. Loppers and elbow-length leather gloves look like a really good idea.) The garden book uses the euphemism 'extremely vigorous'. (I translate 'vigorous' as 'takes over if you give it a chance'; 'extremely vigorous' means 'keep a tac nuke handy, because it wants your continent'.)
I remember when, in an effort to help the state, Paul Prudhomme introduced nutria dishes in his restaurant--the idea was to eat them out of existence. As I remember it the only ones that would order it were tourists that hadn't ever seen a nutria.
#111 First of all, go through and cut the stems of all the tree-climbing ivy and pull as much of it off as you can. You need to kill that stuff first since climbing ivy fruits quicker then ground-growing ivy.
Then you need to start pulling up the ground stuff. The roots will form a mat which you should roll up like a giant carpet. DON'T let this mat stay on the ground, if it is on any earth it will root itself. Haul it off and burn it, if you can. Pulling up ivy is back-breaking, so I recommend hiring a bunch of strong high school students over several weekends. Try to pull out as much of the roots as possible. You won't get them all, but when the roots re-sprout they will be easier to pull up. Fortunately the roots don't go too deep...usually. You will need to keep pulling anything that pops up in the cleared area, probably once a week for a couple years at least.
Roundup is not effective, according to my mother who has been battling ivy for years. It might kill a bit, but not enough to really make any kind of dent in the overall amount. Mom tried dipping the cut ivy ends in a bottle of Roundup, and the plant only experienced very minor die-back.
Paula @ 110... I noticed recently that our Barn Owl is back on the southeast corner of the house...
When we were living around the Bay Area, there was a barn owl living in the palm tree in the backyard next door. Come evening, we'd hear the sound of a squeaky bicycle, we'd check our watches and sure enough it was 8pm and our flying neighbor was off to his night shift.
Oy. I'd be happy to offer some recipes to help our Norwegian friends consume their Stalinist crustacean overlords, but I'm from Maryland, and our crabs are tiny and delicately flavored. Not to mention scarce, these days.
Re: Possums. Possums are gross, y'all. They're nasty little prehistoric-lookin' creatures who eat your phone lines. I rememember descending into my scary basement-cum-coal scuttle and coming face-to-face with one of the little fuckers. We both screamed bloody murder. One of them ossified right next to my furnace. I think I need to mount his skeleton as a warning to others of his icky kind.
Re: Invasive plants. My dad once plotted to plant kudzu around the house my mother bought. For me and my brother to live in. He didn't follow through, but really. Divorce is ugly, y'all.
My backyard is consumed by Japanese honeysuckle. That's what it's called, but it doesn't flower like regular honeysuckle. It just sends runners everywhere and vines that have a conveniently slippery outer casing that makes it hard to pull.
And then there are the Fuckin' Mimosas.... I love their frou-frou, powder-puff-lookin' blossoms! But the ones that take root in your yard don't bloom, they just get in the way, and they have tap roots all the way to China.
Recipe for Stalinist king crab:
Catch crab. Keep in confined area while you heat water to boiling in your biggest pot. (They can live out of water for hours.) Meanwhile, make garlic bread, extra melted garlic butter (or olive-oil-butter-and garlic), and either an undressed crisp green salad or a lightly dressed coleslaw.
Put crab on a stump so it can't crawl away. Whack in half with large axe in order to kill it instantly and make two chunks small enough to fit into the pot. Pull out gills and anything else that doesn't look like meat. Throw crab halves into boiling water. They will cook in a few minutes. Serve with the side dishes, individual bowls of garlic butter for dipping, nutcrackers and kitchen shears to open the shells, and a lot of napkins. Lobster bibs would not be a bad idea.
Roundup is not effective, according to my mother who has been battling ivy for years. It might kill a bit, but not enough to really make any kind of dent in the overall amount. Mom tried dipping the cut ivy ends in a bottle of Roundup, and the plant only experienced very minor die-back
That isn't a very good way of getting glyphosate into a plant. And it needs the plant to be actively growing to be effective.
Now, it's quite possibly illegal to use application methods not listed on the label, and you're likely to be using pre-diluted glyphosate if you get it for gerdening. But if you have a sponge soaked with a strong solution, with added detergent, you can wipe it onto the leaves of a target plant, rather than spray it on.
To be honest, if it's that dense a mat, spray it and let anything underneath take its chances. Actively growing, remember. Leave it two or three weeks, at least. It may be worth using a professional contractor, who can get the undiluted chemical, and add surfactants, and tailor the application to the problem.
Sodium Chlorate, the weedkiller you don't want to mix with sugar, is a better answer for gravel paths and cracks between paving slabs. It persists.
Note: "Round-Up" is a Monsanto trademark, The actual chemical, glyphosate, is out of patent. Guess why Monsanto make such a fuss about GM crop plants that are "Round-Up Ready".
Purple loosestrife, which was introduced originally as a medicinal herb and has since been sold as an ornamental and an apicultural plant, is taking over wetlands in every state but Florida.
It's still sold to gardeners and beekeepers in 47 states. At least some of the cultivars are supposed to be sterile. In practice, generally they're not, and if they were, they still spread by the roots at a rate of a foot a year.
Steff Z@31: I don't know what that's called, but I don't \think/ it's a continuity error; more like artistic licentiousness. I vaguely recall Gaiman grumbling that skunks are also not found in the UK.
I remember, a few steps into our first visit to Kew Gardens, one of us observing that the fauna obviously included geese; surprisingly but fortunately, the weather had been dry enough that the spots of poop all over the sidewalk were desiccated rather than on our shoes. One of the you-may-see-this-wildlife signs explained that branta canadensis had been imported because they were ornamental; apparently nobody knew what efficient grass-converters they were. At least the geese haven't become endemic (not to mention non-migratory) outside Kew, as they have all over New England. (Even if they had, the geese, which will take on anything, would help against raccoons, due to the same diurnal/nocturnal issue as mentioned above for mongoose.) Sometimes being stupid doesn't get its proper reward.
Gene@46: wrt geese, the \environment/ changes may not be the factor; the year-round geese here are the descendants of live decoys, released when the practice was outlawed but long after they'd lost the urge/knowledge to migrate.
CaseyL@88: raccoons are either active throughout the night, or encouraged by streetlights to treat the entire night as twilight; I remember one giving me a how-dare-you-interrupt-my-meal look when I came home after 11pm.
CHip @ 121:
Canada geese are endemic in most of the UK, not just Kew. Yet goose is still expensive in the shops. Humph.
Comments on Nazi Raccoons on the March in Europe: