Up early this morning to get a jump start on things before the rest of the house woke up. I took the garbage out, noticing that the weather was clear and the stars huge and bright in the pre-dawn sky. I also heard some suspicious rustling in the shrubs behind the chicken coop, but it was too dark to see what made the sound. I have my suspicions.
On Samhain night, as is our family custom, we left out a plate of food to share with the Ancestors and Beloved Dead. (Unlike leaving something unharvested in the garden, I have yet to figure out an ecological benefit to this practice, but we do it anyway for the sake of tradition and in memory of those we have lost in our lives.) And around midnight, some shuffling and clinking and the occasional squeaky protest let us know that the "ancestors" had arrived in the guise of a family of raccoons.
When I was small, raccoons here were shyer. My dad, leaving for work very early in the dark winter mornings, would sometimes report that he had seen a few crossing the road, and on rare snowy days we might find some tracks. When I was a bit older, I would find the tracks in the mud near the beach, evidence that the raccoons were taking advantage of the all the food resources available in their environment by hunting for tidepool critters during evening low tides. But of late, they have become quite bold and there have even been some reports of them acting aggressively toward humans.
Raccoons are a good example of wildlife who have embraced humans with open arms, like crows, pigeons, Canada geese, rats, gulls, and in some cases coyotes and deer, and the humans have been unintentionally welcoming. In the suburban borderlands between the city and the wide open spaces, these critters thrive on manicured lawns, home-grown fruits and vegetables, unsecured garbage, pet food left out on porches, and sometimes the pets themselves. What's interesting to me is the attitude of humans toward these animals, and how it changes as they grow more adapted to the environments we have changed the most.
My own attitude toward raccoons has changed a lot. I still enjoy their presence, but I'm a lot less enthusiastic about them after they halved the population of chickens in our backyard croft. To be fair, we had not done an adequate job of providing the chickens with a maximum security facility, and the raccoons, true to their nature, were simply taking advantage of that. I am also now aware that raccoons carry a stunning array of diseases, some of which are transmissible to humans with potentially lethal effects, so I'm not too keen on the notion of a family of raccoons living (and pooping) in my yard.
Bald eagles still enjoy reverence and respect as wildlife here, although I have heard that in southeast Alaska the birds are so common that no one gives them another thought, and some tourists who want to see the eagles are told to go to the garbage dump to watch them scavenge. In the Salish Sea we are still happy to see the eagles around, because as recently as 30 years ago they were still quite rare here. As the local population has recovered and nesting pairs have moved in to urban greenbelts, they have become a much more common sight. I frequently hear them calling when I'm working in the garden, or see them flying over the house or perching in the taller trees nearby. Their population increase has, however, been detrimental to the local great blue heron population. Several heron rookeries have been attacked by bald eagles. As a great blue heron fan, I'm not happy about this, even while I am grateful that the eagle population is doing so well.
River otters are another example. It happens that around here, river otters use the salt water environment as long as there's a source of fresh water nearby. And it happens that in an area as rainsoaked as this, there is almost always a river, creek, storm drain, or some other source of fresh water nearby. Coincidentally, river otters really like riprap shorelines, which are a relatively easy and inexpensive way to address shoreline erosion, especially around marinas where riprap is also used to build breakwaters. So as humans have created more riprap shorelines, the river otters have moved in, and it seems they also enjoy hanging around on docks and the boats moored nearby, where they do completely unreasonable things like poop. A lot. All in the same place. Because for river otters, poop is like Facebook--a quick way for them to get updates from all the other otters in the area. If your boat is the spot they have chosen for one of these fecal information kiosks, that's no fun and in fact causes great frustration among the owners of such chosen vessels. I recently saw a news article about a dog who ate poison intended for river otters at a marina (note that the reporter's explanation of why the otters "mark their territory" in this article is completely wrong, but it was Fox News, after all).
It seems that the more successful another species is and the better it is able to adapt to the same environments we have changed to make ourselves comfortable, the less we tend to like it. Basically, the more they become like us, the more we start to feel like they don't belong close to us. Which is curious, really. If you look at how the human population has scattered over the planet and become successful in wildly divergent environments, is it really possible that we might feel threatened by animals who take advantage of the changes we've made? Why don't we just domesticate them into pets or working animals, like our ancestors did? Or is this contact with wildlife who aren't backing down triggering an old instinct forgotten as we have largely cut ourselves off from the natural world--the instinct that reminds us we're not at the top of the food chain after all?
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