Anastasia Higginbotham and her son Lionel found a raccoon living on the fire escape outside their apartment window in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn.Late one night, shortly after Kai Lui and his wife, Laura Campbell-Lui, moved into their Queen Anne-style house in Midwood, Brooklyn, she shook him awake, insisting that she heard intruders. Mr. Lui went to investigate and discovered noises coming from the fourth-floor attic.
He called the police. “They had their weapons drawn,” said Mr. Lui, a 41-year-old computer network administrator, recalling that night a few years ago, when an officer climbed a ladder and poked his head inside the attic. “I distinctly remember him laughing.”
The intruder turned out to be a raccoon. The raccoon scampered, and the police left, but Mr. Lui’s problem with unwanted guests remained.
His quest to rid his house of raccoons required enlisting the services of a wildlife trapper, cutting down a tree and replacing the roof, which had holes. But he harbors no ill will toward the persistent visitors.
“I figure they were here first,” he said. “We’re intruding on their space.”
Raccoons have long been widespread in New York City, and there is no way to say with any statistical certainty whether there are more now. But Capt. Richard Simon of the Urban Park Rangers, which is part of the city’s Parks Department, said a rise in the number of 311 callers reporting sightings, encounters or interactions suggests that “the citywide population of raccoons has increased.”
One thing seems clear. In the leafy neighborhoods surrounding Brooklyn’s Prospect Park and Green-Wood Cemetery, residents have been flooding the Internet with raccoon stories.
Chris Kreussling, a computer programmer who lives just south of Prospect Park in Flatbush, posted pictures on his Flatbush Gardener blog recently of several raccoons in his backyard. It elicited a quick round of similar testimonies.
Another Brooklyn blog, the Gowanus Lounge, chronicled multiple raccoon sightings in recent days in Park Slope, Carroll Gardens, Windsor Terrace and Red Hook.
When contacted, many bloggers recalled raccoons rooting around in gardens and compost piles, traipsing into children’s wading pools and sometimes rearing up on their hind legs when startled. Many expressed awe at seeing the nocturnal mammals so close.
“People need access to wildlife in urban areas,” Mr. Kreussling said. “I consider it a bonus.”
Raccoons that appear to be a threat to public health or safety are taken by Animal Care and Control to a shelter and, if necessary, tested for rabies. This year, eight raccoons found in the city have tested positive for rabies.
“We want to maintain a healthy population of raccoons in the state,” Mr. Simon said, explaining that raccoons “adjust their patterns to where they find the most food.”
In other words, since raccoons flourish as much on tossed-out leftovers as on insects and worms, residents who do not want to unknowingly welcome them should secure garbage cans and other food sources.
That was a lesson learned by Nelson Ryland, 37, a film editor who lives in Ditmas Park with his wife, two children and a cat, which once enjoyed the use of a small door in the basement that could be slid up or down. One evening, as Mr. Ryland and his wife sat down to watch television and dig into a container of vanilla ice cream, they heard something in the kitchen chomping away on the cat food.
Their cat was in the room with them.
Mr. Ryland rose from his chair and yelled as he saw a large raccoon scoot down the basement steps and then watched it flee out the cat door. Mr. Ryland shut the metal door. What he did not realize is that raccoons have highly dexterous front feet, which are shaped like human fingers. A short time later, the raccoon had returned and had resumed snacking on the cat food.
As Mr. Ryland chased it downstairs a second time, he could not help but admire how deftly the animal lifted the metal door and slipped out into the night. “I have to have a certain amount of respect for them,” he said. “They’ve managed to survive in this tough city like the rest of us.”
Mr. Ryland also learned that raccoons have good memories; studies have shown that they can recall learned tasks for up to three years. Mr. Ryland tried keeping the cat door closed for several months, reopening it only after he assumed the nighttime visitor had forgotten about it. But each time, within a day or two, a raccoon would reappear. “They must be checking our cat door,” he said.
Ken Taylor, the vice president of operations for Green-Wood Cemetery, supervises the trapping of raccoons in the cemetery, where they tear up the manicured lawn searching for grubs. “We drive them far enough away where they’ll have a new home, and they’ll become someone else’s problem,” he says, describing how the police have occasionally driven into the cemetery with a raccoon in their trunk to let loose. “We say, ‘Please don’t dump them here.’ ”
As part of his campaign to rid his home of raccoons, Mr. Lui called Trapper John, an animal wildlife control business based in Holmes, N.Y., operated by Johnny Terpo. For three straight days, Mr. Terpo sat outside from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. until he finally saw a raccoon emerge from a hole in Mr. Lui’s roof. Mr. Terpo climbed a ladder and patched the hole with some mesh. Mr. Lui said he thought his troubles were over.
But the next night there was more cacophony in his attic. There had been two raccoons in the attic, and the second one was frantically trying to claw its way out. Mr. Terpo reopened the hole and waited until the raccoon finally left. Mr. Lui still sees raccoons on his property, but at least they have not made their way back into his attic — for now.
