The blog post quoted above finishes: “Please advise. These animals have to go!” But then it addends words to the effect of: And don’t tell me to keep my cat inside, because I’m not going to do that. I am a cat lover and have always lived with cats (currently, with our beloved tuxedo-wearing Delilah); I sympathize deeply with the loss of any pet and understand the emotions such a trauma can unleash. But to allow even a marginal wildness in our lives and cities will involve compromise. We will have to store our refuse and secure the lids. We will have to bring the cat food inside and keep an eye on our pets. We will have to do this as a matter of course, with a sense of our constant continuity with the natural world and the kinship between us that includes—and transcends—myth and mask and feet and fact. Ideally, we will manage these things with our creative good humor intact.
A group of raccoons is almost always made up of a mother raccoon and her young, who stay with her for several months. Females rarely tolerate male company, except during their brief estrus, though, curiously, males will often defer to mother raccoons when they find themselves in the same place, say at a communal water source. Young are born in the spring, in litters of up to six but typically of three to five, and we sometimes see these family groups during daylight hours: a mother and her growing kits, the mother foraging for the young, who require frequent feeding (as for all wild animals, survival of the young is uncertain—by midsummer, we often see a female with just one remaining kit, or none at all).
The tremendous majority of indoor raccoon encounters end peacefully, and when both food and avenues of entrance are removed, the raccoons move on. One woman sent me this typical story: After moving to the city, she installed a cat door and kept a big bowl of good-smelling cat food just inside. One morning soon after, she came downstairs to discover a raccoon eating the food as her cat looked on in exaggerated horror, as cats do so well. She scooted the raccoon out and decided she’d have to do something about it. The next morning she woke to a rat that had come in the same way. Rats do not elicit the sympathy that raccoons sometimes do, and so that very day she locked the cat door, forcing her cat to scratch at the door until a human let him in. Another evening she heard a scratch at the door and opened it, expecting her cat but instead finding a big raccoon and a tiny raccoon, clearly a mother and kit. The adult raccoon looked up expectantly, as if to say, Isn’t this how we come in? I saw the cat do it… She closed the door, laughing, and the raccoons never returned.
I do not run unless I’m being chased. Not being a runner means that I have managed to avoid the recent trend of running barefoot, which has surfaced every now and then over the course of running history but has been made particularly popular today by the publication of Chris McDougall’s bestseller Born to Run. Human feet, the argument goes, have been housed their entire pathetic foot lives in the little tanks of shoes. Shoes not only overprotect our feet, and therefore keep them from being as strong or as sensitive to their surroundings as they ought to be, but also force us to walk poorly; people propel themselves heel to toe instead of placing each foot on its outside edge and rolling it toward the center, as is purportedly more natural for human feet and legs and more healthy for bodies (knees and spines, in particular). The latter method of walking and running may also increase endurance. Bears and raccoons, other plantigrade animals that sometimes stand on their hind legs and have palm-like soles like ours, walk this way, as do many elegant four-leggeds (foxes, coyotes, cats).
Trendiness aside, humans do walk funny. The upper body leans forward until, at the last second, the foot catches the full force of the body’s weight. Exaggerated, the motion becomes a lurch. Long before Born to Run, tracker Tom Brown Jr. suggested the fox walk for humans seeking a more nature-tuned gait. We are instructed to stand straight and tall over our feet rather than lean forward, roll our foot out-in at each step, and lift the foot using the front of the thigh instead of propelling from the calf. Exaggerated, this movement becomes more of a prance. Thinking I’d rather prance than lurch, I have practiced both woodland and urban walks this way. I look silly, for sure, but this way of walking is lighter and quieter. I can feel that it is easier on my delicate metatarsals and on the slender, brittle tibiae we all share (no shin splints when running or walking like this). Still, I wonder. It doesn’t feel natural, and I cannot tell whether this is because I have been walking in the lurch for four decades and am not accustomed to walking properly or because humans are not meant to lift their feet with their thighs. And I miss the nice propelling motion.
I couldn’t help thinking of such things as I examined the raccoon tracks in my freshly turned garden bed this morning. Impulsively, I pulled my shoes and socks off and tracked along beside them. Leaning over to inspect the impressions side by side, I felt a frisson of connection. The kinship I sense comes from a kind of shape recognition—Gosh darn, that little foot sure looks like mine—more than from any close evolutionary connection (except for the fact that humans and raccoons are both mammalian vertebrates, with the same basic bauplan, including the same names for our bones—tibiae, scapulae, radii, ulnae—we are not much related). But the same number of toes can’t be the only reason the raccoon makes me think so acutely about my feet, my tracks, the where, why, and how of my own walking.
Master tracker Paul Rezendes writes: “When we experience the natural world, whether it be through tracking, hiking, or just walking in the woods, we are learning about ourselves and our role in nature’s process. When we encounter nature, we also encounter ourselves.” When I read this, I thought, How beautiful, this idea that wild tracks lead to human lives—wild lives and human lives so bravely connected. As I delved further into the tracking literature, I discovered that nearly every accomplished tracker says something of this kind. In tracking and keeping track of the life around us, we are at the same time tracking ourselves. It is a lovely, poetic notion. But in the case of the raccoon, it is true not just in a pretty, provocative, metaphorical sense, but absolutely literally. Where do the tracks lead? The impressions of those little hand-feet? They lead to our garbage cans, our refuse, the stuff of our lives. The multitude of things we were sure we needed and then threw out. They lead to the fluffy dead ring-tailed bodies we saw, or did not see, and ran over. They lead to our rich history of hats and hunts and watchful coexistence. They track through the mud at the corner of the garden to the cat door, the dog food, the chicken coop. They lead straight to the back door.
The Untold Story of Raccoon Scats
Given the raccoons’ varied, omnivorous diet, their scats differ tremendously, even from day to day, and though they can form even, blunt-ended tubes, they are often just an amorphous assemblage of seeds and other indigestibles. The examination of scats is a wonderful way to find out what urban animals have been up to, where they’ve been, and what (or who) they have been eating. But in the case of raccoon scats, extra caution is in order, as they may contain the eggs of Baylisascaris procyonis, raccoon roundworm, which are potentially dangerous to humans. If the eggs are ingested, larvae can emerge and migrate to the lungs, brain, or eyes, causing severe and potentially fatal illness (the few reported fatalities occurred in young children who had ingested a substantial number of eggs). Taking a peek at outdoor raccoon poops is harmless, but don’t smell them, and do not bring raccoon scats indoors; when removing raccoon waste from an attic or crawl space, wear a face mask, or—better yet—call a professional. Outdoors, raccoons will often use the same sheltered place for their waste over and over—a raccoon latrine. If you have raccoons in your neighborhood, watch for the latrines along the pathways, especially at the base of larger trees where they nap or feed on fruit.
Opossum
The Urban Monster
One recent winter day, an opossum was found under the bench of a subway car in Manhattan. The train was evacuated, and the NYPD in full regalia swooped in to extricate the little animal. When the opossum hissed and bared its teeth, New York’s Finest retreated and called the animal-control agents, who remo
ved the opossum and carried him off, in a metal box, into the night. It was a surprise to everyone; other animals have turned up on the subway, of course—chickens, squirrels, raccoons, even a coyote—but this was the first known subway-riding opossum. It’s not difficult to imagine how it happened. The nocturnal animal was ambling about in its slow opossum way, perhaps was attracted by the smell of garbage to the subway terminal, became frightened by the noise and bustle, and scampered into what appeared to be a dark, quiet corner. Repeated calls from New York Times reporters to the animal-control authorities were never returned, so we can only assume that things ended badly for the opossum. If the police had known just a little more about opossums, or if they had brought along the favored opossum-removal tool (a kitchen broom), the event might have been handled with less fanfare, and no wildlife mortality.
Opossums have a general reputation for viciousness, and though this perception is misguided, it’s not difficult to see how it came about. The opossum has a white face that looks ghostly in the night, and lots of teeth—fifty teeth, more than any other North American mammal and about the same number as a Tyrannosaurus rex (which is why the snout is so long: it needs to cover all those teeth)—and that many sharp teeth might inspire a general impression of menace. But as far as being vicious or somehow dangerous, opossums are neither. When human and opossum paths cross, it is very often because an opossum has wandered somewhere that a human doesn’t want it to be—into the garage, or the kitchen, or onto the back porch where the dog food is kept. My sister found one in her bathroom. So the human tries to get rid of the opossum, who suddenly feels cornered and threatened.
An opossum skull, displaying the animal’s impressive number of teeth
An opossum that is confronted by a larger mammal (such as a human) and is afraid will hiss, grunt, bare its fifty teeth, and make all sorts of hideous noises in an attempt to seem as terrifying as possible. It might, if you put your hand way too close, try to bite you (though probably not); it will not outright attack you. The opossum is making all these noises not because it is vicious but because it is frightened. It just wants to get away without getting killed (and as a smallish animal, and given its species’ track record against predators, it has good reason to doubt its potential success).
I asked wildlife-removal expert Sean Met (who specializes in nonlethal removal and has handled hundreds of opossums) about the opossum personality. “Harmless,” he told me. “Fraidy cats.” Met tells me that this sometimes makes his job difficult. Whereas a raccoon in an attic or crawl space will growl and pace when you enter, an opossum will curl itself tightly into the most out-of-the-way corner, hiding its white face and remaining completely silent, which makes it surprisingly difficult to find, even when you know it is there. In daily life, they are not very social, have little reason to vocalize, and so are essentially quiet. Opossums are the most silent of all urban mammals.
I myself have always been indifferent to opossums. While I could never summon outright hostility over something that seemed so weird and misfit, I couldn’t quite muster up affection or even particular interest in an animal that is so pointy and whose eyes always seem so unfocused. But the more I have studied them, the more fascinated I have become, and I realize that my own preconception of the opossum is, like everyone’s, mainly superficial—based entirely on a narrow human aesthetic sensibility and the opossum’s apparently unforgivable failure to meet it.
People who study them, even those who don’t like opossums initially, describe them primarily with the adjectives placid, gentle, and quiet. Though many people believe the animals to be potentially rabid, rabies and distemper are virtually unheard of in opossums, and there is not a single case on record in North America of rabies being transferred from an opossum to a human or a domestic pet. Opossum pelage is very soft, and has layers of color. Other than when it is hunting small animals for food, an opossum will never, pretty much ever attack anything unless it has been cornered and threatened by that thing or its young are in danger. Cats and opossums generally ignore each other, unless the cat is pestering an opossum’s young, and in such cases, frequently the opossum still backs down from the cat. When an opossum takes shelter in your attic or under your house, it usually doesn’t stay more than a few days (though if it is very cold or if the opossum has young and there is a reliable food source—like your garbage can or outdoor pet food supply—it may stay longer). And unlike squirrels, raccoons, and rats, opossums do not dig, burrow, chew wood or wires, or wreak any sort of destruction on lawns, yards, or buildings. Opossums sleep up to twenty hours a day, out of which five hours is REM-cycle sleep, implying that opossums dream, even more than humans do. Opossums’ favorite foods are things we would like to have eradicated from our homes and yards: mice, rats, cockroaches, other large insects and spiders, slugs, and carrion. Opossums are extremely clean and wash their faces like cats. Their front paws are shaped like small stars.
The Broom: How to Remove an Opossum
If an opossum has managed to find its way into your house or outbuilding, the best way to get it out is to quietly open all available exits and then leave for a while. If there is an open food source (dog food, a basket of apples), and the opossum is not too close to it, remove that as well. If the opossum hisses at you, don’t worry. Remember that it will not run at you or try to bite you. It will cower away from you while pretending to be ferocious—do not believe it. Just go calmly on your way—the less you worry the opossum, the more free it will feel to move from its corner and out the door. If you feel that the opossum has had time enough and yet does not seem inclined to leave, you can encourage it with that tried-and-true animal-removal device: the broom. Gently place the broom behind the opossum’s rear and shove it along. Again, don’t be afraid of the hissing. It’s just posing. If the opossum freaks out and plays dead, well, then—lucky you. Most people (including me) have never observed this fascinating behavior up close (I’m seriously thinking of trying to badly frighten the next opossum I see, just so I can observe the torpid state). If it does, resist the temptation to lift the opossum onto a shovel. Just leave it until it wakes up and goes.
The broom, while a traditional and popular choice for removing all kinds of animals from the home, is not always appropriate. For animals that can get around quickly (birds, squirrels), it serves only to frighten them, make them flap or run more wildly about, and stress everyone out (them and you). It can actually harm more delicate animals (birds, bats). Always try the leave-the-door-open method first, and then save brooms for slower, robust animals, such as opossums and raccoons.
In spite of the creature’s general harmlessness and placidity, the history of human-opossum perceptions is a rocky one. When Europeans began exploring the New World, there were many new and unfamiliar beasts to excite and terrify: alligators, armadillos, rattlesnakes. But none captured the imagination like the opossum. Vicente Yáñez Pinzón, commander of Columbus’s ship Nina, made the first English-language mention of the beast in 1492 after finding one in Brazil. It was a “Monster,” he wrote, something like a fox, but “the hinder a Monkey, the feet were like a Mans, with Ears like an Owl; under whose Belly hung a great Bag, in which it carry’d the Young.” He managed to catch one and ship it live to King Ferdinand of Spain. Others were sent back to Europe—live animals, pickled specimens for dissection, drawings and engravings depicting bear-size, misproportioned, fang-toothed beasts—much to the shock, amazement, and perhaps secret delight of the public. All were agreed: the opossum was a glimpse into the menagerie of depraved and loathsome monstrosities that were to be expected on unknown continents, a confirmation of the deep-running suspicion that the New World was a dark wilderness full of mystery and monsters. “Early on,” writes Susan Scott Parrish, a scholar of colonial natural history at the University of Michigan, “the opossum was proof of the New World’s propensity to produce strange and horrible beasts.” Atlantic explorations persisted over the next three hundred years. The opossum continued to fascinate as th
e fear and ignorance of the Dark Ages and the conjurations of medieval science gave way to comparative anatomy, natural philosophy, and, says Parrish, a sense that all creatures were “part of God’s wonderful, providential design.” The opossum served as a kind of bridge between medieval and Enlightenment science.
Opossum Feet and Tracks
An opossum’s tracks look something like a raccoon’s, but with practice, you will find they are not difficult to tell apart. Both the front and back opossum paws have five fingers, again recalling the human hand, though not quite as fondly as the raccoon’s. The front track of the opossum has short, stubby digits, and the softer the substrate, the farther they spread into a star-flower shape. The back track has a truly opposable hallux with no claw. It looks very much like a hand with the thumb sticking way out. This thumb and the prehensile tail that can wrap and hold branches make the possum a capable, though not particularly fast or agile, climber.
There are more than seventy species of opossum in the Western Hemisphere, but only one in North America—Didelphis virginiana, the Virginia opossum, our sole native marsupial. When the original British colonists arrived, opossums were found only in the southeastern part of what would become the United States. Using the new human shelters and food sources as stepping stones, opossums made their way west, and north into Canada. As pioneers migrated farther west, any notion of opossums as monsters was forgotten, and they took the animals along with them. Opossums were kept alive for fresh food, and their pelts were used for clothing. Children tamed young opossums and convinced their parents to spare them from the food larder so they could be kept as pets. Along the way, many opossums escaped, and others were released in hopes that they would take hold as furbearers and stock for wild food. By the end of the nineteenth century, western populations of opossums had become established and were spreading. Even so, not all ecologists agree that the opossum ought to be considered an introduced species in the West, as their range expansion, mirroring their original, postcolonial dispersal, might have occurred even without introduction by humans. They would have padded across the country, slowly but steadily, in their own opossum time.
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