My hours of Raccoon Watch finally paid off

Soon after we moved into our new Ottawa apartment we learned that, like many urban areas in North America, our neighborhood has something of a raccoon problem. Much to our surprise it took only a few days for us to spot a local raccoon making its way across the roof of the garage behind our building.

After this first sighting we soon learned that if you wanted to see this local raccoon all you needed to do was sit on our balcony at dusk and, like clockwork, it will make its way across the roof and through a gap between the garage and the adjacent fence.

After about two days of this apparent pattern I was hooked. I started spending at least a few minutes our balcony each night watching and listening for this neighborhood raccoon to make its nightly appearance. Even after only five or ten minutes to my stakeout I was almost always rewarded with an appearance by the raccoon.

Of course one of the frustrations of my nightly watch was my seeming inability to take a photo of the creature that didn't look as though I had taken a photo of dirt. After a few dozen photos I was beginning to think that I might never be able to properly capture a reasonable image of our furry friend.

Finally on Friday night my luck turned. Our neighbors seem to have been kind enough to have left some trash out for the raccoon to rummage through on Thursday night, and then they were also kind enough to leave the shredded bag in the same place on their back steps all day on Friday.

This great generosity on the part of our neighbors turned out to be enough to attract the raccoon back for a second feeding from the same source on Friday night. Because the back porch on which the pile of garbage was located was a story off the ground and also not the ground I was finally able to have a much better view of the animal.

It turned out all I needed to get a better shot of the animal was a better view, and maybe also the raccoon's innate sense of performance.

While I won't go so far as to say that this is a great, or even good, photo of a raccoon, at least it is a photo of a raccoon that is clearly a photo of a raccoon.