No beach nearby and certainly no air conditioned mall so what was up? It was the Critter Care Wildlife Society open house!!!
This event was popular with young and old alike. Prices were very affordable (a $2 donation for each adult). Things seemed well organized (although it was challenging to find a location to recycle water bottles).
We went for the tour of the facilities and animals which was guided by one of the many international interns (there are locals as well but many come from other countries) our guide was from New Zealand.
We could not see the bears as contact with so many people would defeat the purpose of rehabilitation and release back into the wild as they would become overly familiar with humans. However we did see the bobcat (a permanent resident as it has become too familiar with humans). We saw opossums, raccoons etc. The facility is clean and well run with many good corporate donators, and of course smaller scale supporters such as ourselves. They require a lot of food for example as thus far this year they have 500 animals under their care.
Our Kiwi guide was a raccoon mom! She volunteered with a group of the raccoons for a minimum 3 months (for many hours a day) teaching many things to these abandoned and/or injured animals. The idea is to prepare them for release back into the wild as healthy prepared animals.
Raccoons!! You say, just raccoons….well although they certainly are populous in our area they also therefore get hit by cars all too frequently…and suffer from other human imposed dangers…so it seems good to help animals we interface with so much in our urban areas.
Are raccoons precious or a pest to you?
Above raccoon photo by Chocolate Girl
9 comments on the Blade:
'Are raccoons precious or a pest to you?'
Precious as in cute, sure.
Pest, when it can possibly and very willingly take a chunk out of me, you bet.
Russ;)
Raccoons are awesome furry creatures. Its my guess they like to chew on things so I would'nt even try to familiarise, housetrain or even keep one in the house. Wild animals are generally fussy about what they eat and can tell the difference between purified distilled water and tap water just by smelling it.
Hi Russ,
LOL Raccoons are cute and I suppose they may bite in some circumstances (although typically they don’t want much to do with us humans) but they do like to pilfer our garbage at times…They had 100 raccoons at Critter Care…
Hi Spacerguy!
It was interesting to watch the baby raccoons at Critter Care interact with each other and the human volunteers. It seems they have a tremendous amount of curiosity. They had all manner of things to interact with including child pools with fish they could catch. At their age they still could not catch fish in that kind of scenario.
I suppose that one of the things people find to be a pest about raccoons is they do at times adventure into our garbage etc but this seems more our fault than theirs…although they can be amazingly agile problem solvers when trying to get at something.
Raccoons would make an interesting alien sentient species!
Would you like to have raccoons in your part of the world?
CG and LS, I like raccoons a lot, we have one on our backyard visiting us sometimes, I just get angry once in the while when tree branches are broken, and he leaves big pile of pooooo on the fence, lol, otherwise its all good. The are in fact very intelligent animals, and those little hand always amaze me. I have a feeling that the raccoon ate all my gooseberries last year. CG excellent moment captured. Anna :)
Hi Anna…(from both of us)
ROFL Thanks so much for sharing your raccoon story! We have friends that get regular piles of gifts from the raccoons but they also love to watch their antics. Of course they also like to catch fish form yard ponds….
Raccoons are quite intelligent and very curious; I admire their curiosity…which of course also at times leads to trouble…
Those gooseberry thieves! What do you do with the gooseberries?
CG says the raccoons were natural posers, they were real drama queens…LOL
Hey LS I eat gooseberries, lol. I grew up in a semi farm, and my parents with my grandparents planted all kinds of berries around - you name it, so we used to eat them all summer long, along with other fruits like plums, apples, pears - it was like garden of Eden. I miss it a lot .... it seems like when we get older we like to muse about the past. Anna :)
Anna it sounds like a wonderful place to grow up….LOL I think your right we do tend to romanticize the past as we get older….perhaps its good that we remember more of the good than the bad? Maybe its just our personalities?
Raccoons are of course precious! Look at their cute little face! It's so adorable.
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