Pregnant raccoons show up in the daytime this time of year, looking for food, eating for five.
I was up at dawn and noticed what Gary calls a pregnant DayCoon wandering in the back yard. First, it was odd that she was wandering: usually the DayCoons eat desperately and then run away. She was tooling slowly around an area of the yard where there was no food or water. She was not on her way home, which is through the sewer in the back left corner. She was in the front right corner, by the neighbors’ fence.
She slowly scaled the fence, and instead of jumping down, pivoted at the top and crawled paw over paw back down the other side. I waited until I thought she was down before I raced out to see where she was headed, because she had no business being in that yard.
She was gone. Poof. I honestly thought I might have dreamed it. Then I thought, perhaps she’s gone through a hole in their fence and is in the front, in the street, headed for a different sewer.
No. She was not. A duck was in the middle of the street. A colorful, spectacular, quacking mallard duck.
“Well, this is messed up,” I thought, and went to wake Gary up so he could see that the Wildlife is emboldened by the lack of traffic and are taking over our street, just like the supposed dolphins in the Venice canals and the elk wandering around New York City.
I threw open the front door to show him the spectacular duck, and saw it had moved to the middle of the driveway across the street, and was strangely less gorgeous. It wasn’t until I saw the male join her from his post in the middle of the street that I realized they were a couple, spectacular male and dowdy female.
They waddled off down the street, side by side in sync like The Monkees, then they circled back and vanished into the backyard of the house across the street.
The injustice. Does the neighbor where the raccoon went have a yard with a giant pile of nuts? No. I suspect he has a hollow tree with a hole full of baby raccoons, though. Does the neighbor where the ducks went have a heated ground-level bird-bath? No. That neighbor has an in-ground pool. So not fair.