Raccoons are Evil.

There, I've said it.

In our very few months as people who feed birds we’ve learned one hard lesson: bird feeders are magnets for all manner of other, much greedier, creatures. So far it’s two feeders totally written off after crashing to the ground multiple times, and a third held together with packing tape until parts arrive to repair it.

Until today I blamed the squirrels who sit on our deck railings and scream abuse at me whenever I go out to refill and repair the feeders. We’ve watched them up above us, plotting their attack vectors, and making mad leaps at the feeders, sometimes connecting, and sometimes not. It made perfect sense to me that sometimes when they do a full John Wick into the side of a feeder they might have managed to actually knock it off of it’s hook and send it crashing to the ground.

My solution was to eliminate that possibility. Most bird feeders hang from an S hook. It’s cheap, and easy to take down and put up. But if your fling your full squirrely might at the feeder in just the right angle it will knock the feeder off of its hook and it will break open when it hits the ground.

KA-CHING!

So I turned to one of my all-time favorite tools: the MEC clip for hanging stuff. Cheap, indestructible, and colorful, and surely more than any squirrel will ever defeat.

Until two days later, when our new, brand new, feeder was on the ground, smashed, like the two pictured above.

I was baffled. I looked closely, and the MEC clip was still attached to the feeder, so I couldn’t imagine how a squirrel could have knocked it loose. The physics of squirrel velocity vs bird feeder just didn’t work that way.

Then, while touring a garden up the road on Mahone Bay, we were talking to a thirty-year gardener. She made the comment that raccoons were the big problem, and that they’re entirely nocturnal. They come out after sunset, and disappear before sunrise.

At which point I went “Of course! Raccoons!” Because we’d never seen one, it never crossed our mind.

They’re greedy, they eat anything, they climb, they’re big and strong, and they have nimble little fingers. The next morning when I looked out I could see where someone had actually been fiddling with the attachments on the “squirrel proof” feeder.

And suddenly I knew it. It wasn’t the cute little squirrels - it was the evil damned raccoons!

Although honestly I have nothing against the masked bandits, as long as I can figure out how we can co-exist. For now it looks like we’ll take down the bird feeders just before going to bed.