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Midnight Bandits And My Cat Spike!
My cat Spike was mad! He is used to eating breakfast around 7:00 a.m., but I didn't awake until almost 8:00. I heard his meowing in the garage and from the sound I knew he was still in his bed, but complaining that breakfast had not been served! He gets loud when he's not fed his Meow Mix on time.
The sight that welcomed me was not pretty. The vagrant band of raccoons that visit my garage on a regular basis had discovered the buckets of pecans I'd picked up during the day. I had collected more than I had time to process, but this didn't bother the raccoons. They proceeded to crack and shell pecans all over the garage.
Over the last several years my garage appears to have become a half-way house for raccoons. They use my cat's food dish to treat themselves to human food without having to scatter the contents of my garbage can all over the yard. Spike's cat food is also more nutritional!
Packed with vitamins and minerals, one of the three raccoons that currently visit almost every night is getting so fat that he can hardly get through the pet door designed for cats. Spike is partial to the tuna flavor of the cat food, but occasionally he will get the chicken flavor. It doesn't matter to the raccoons what the flavor of the day is; they simply devour anything placed in the food dish.
I hadn't given much thought to leaving the buckets of pecans out in the open, practically inviting any hungry animal to grab as many of the nuts as it could eat. Since our home is near a small woods complete with vegetable gardens on the side, my house is a natural target for a raccoon's nightly snack.
In the wild, there's not much that raccoons won't eat. They like grasshoppers, grapes, corn, worms, mice, bird eggs, berries, garden vegetables and walnuts. I've discovered they also love pecans. They don't carry the nuts out of the garage; they just crack them with their teeth and spit the shells all over the floor.
Raccoons are slobs! If they were standing on the table or the work bench eating a nut, that's where they would leave their scraps of pecan shells. The tops of the washer and drier were also covered with debris from their midnight scavenging of my pecans. I can see why Spike ignores the raccoons and tries to sleep through the commotion each night!
Spike has a box, complete with several pillows for comfort, where he sleeps while all this is going on. The box is on a table in the middle of the garage and he occasionally raises his head over the edge to see what the racket below is all about; that's the extent of his involvement in the chaos below.
In the wild, raccoons will eat practically anything; crayfish, grasshoppers, grapes, corn, worms, beetles, walnuts, cherries, mice, bird eggs, small snakes, acorns, berries, garden vegetables, and soybeans. Since they are becoming less fearful of humans, no garbage can is safe from their nightly raids.
Cats sleep more than humans, about 13 to 16 hours a day. Spike spends almost two-thirds of his life snoring, without letting hungry varmints disturb that blissful state of relaxation. When morning comes and his cat food dish is empty from the assault on it from masked bandits, my cat wails almost like a dog. Unfortunately this is in cat language and sounds really weird.
Normally an early riser, Spike gets impatient when he has to wait on breakfast. A cup full of cat food, Tuna Surprise, calms him down. By now the raccoons, like vampires, have retreated from the sun and are peacefully snoozing in their dens. Once again, all is right with the world.
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