It’s the end to a wonderful day. You just finished cleaning up from a delicious dinner and start getting ready to take the trash from the day outside. As you walk outside to your trash barrel, you notice a pair of eyes peering out from inside the barrel. Pausing, you slowly grab your phone to turn the flashlight on, only to be met with a bandit: a raccoon! Raccoons are known as trash pandas or bandits, sneaking into people’s yards and going through their trash, only to disappear into the night. What people are not aware of is that we are attracting raccoons right into our suburban and urbanized areas. How you might ask? Read on to find out why!
Why Raccoons are in our Humanized Landscapes
Raccoons are very smart and intelligent creatures, seeming to be increasing in their abundance within urbanized landscapes; the question to ask is why? Why are these creatures becoming established in our urban landscapes rather than hiding in the forest where they are from? The answer to this question is one that has been discussed among wildlife biologists for years, and the reason seems to be that humans are unintentionally participating in the education of raccoons. Over the past 80 or so years, raccoons have made this astonishing surge in their populations, having their highest densities within suburban areas and slowly increasing in cities. Raccoons have well-adjusted to living with and among human beings, and this has what’s resulted in raccoons increasing domination of our humanized landscapes.
How This Issue was Established
Researching this issue lead me to Suzanne MacDonald, a biologist and psychologist from York University located in Toronto, Canada. She has been researching this issue and her work suggests that raccoons living in cities may actually be smarter than rural raccoons due to them forced to navigate man-made obstacles, such as roads. Using GPS collars to track raccoons, MacDonald found that these raccoons started to avoid major roads that crossed, almost suggesting raccoons have learned how to avoid cars. From this, it seems humans have inadvertently created a mini classroom within our cities for raccoons to learn from and become “perfect urban warriors” within human landscapes. But the question still remains, how do these creatures navigate their way into our human landscapes?
Crossing the Divide
Raccoons typically live in forested habitats that are heavily wooded with access to many trees, water, and vegetation. They make dens out of hollowed out trees or abandoned burrows made from other animals. When they search for food, they can travel up to 18 miles per day while foraging. However, over the past several decades, we’ve seen these creatures make there ways into our humanized landscapes and become successful at living quite efficiently within cities and the suburbs. The question still remains, how did raccoons make there way into these landscapes, away from their natural habitats? The answer to this question is roads; have you ever been driving down a road and noticed two glowing eyes peering out from a storm drain? More than likely, this pair of eyes belongs to a raccoon, as they use storm drains as a safety underground tunnel before crossing a road from one side to the other. Storm drains, also called culverts, were originally created for channel streams to pass under roadways. Now our wildlife creatures have found a safe and useful way to cross roads, without interacting with the traffic or cars up above. If these culverts or storm drain systems were set up on each and every road ever made, then animals would have a safe and efficient way of crossing our man-made obstacles without the repercussions of things such as mortality or vehicle collisions.
An example of this was seen on a highway in Maryland, where a researcher noticed raccoons using the storm drains for coverage and wanted to investigate why. Low and behold, other species such as reptiles and small mammals also use these storm drains to cross under roads as well, with a study being conducted showing 57 species of wildlife using all 265 culverts in Maryland. From this, road ecology researchers can now understand how drainage structures can be formed to allow for channel streams to pass under roads as well as wildlife; this will in turn help to decrease the amount of roadkill we see on out highways and roads, especially with raccoons.
Raccoons are intelligent creatures, finding ways to to stay safe and efficiently move from place to place through our drainage systems implemented in our roads. More roads need to have the features that drainage systems pose for our wildlife if we want to keep the amount of mortalities and wildlife-vehicle collisions at a decreasing rate. Wildlife are beginning to learn the ways of our man-made obstacles, and if we research how they are doing so, we can effectively ensure that the proper features of roads are in place so our wildlife are safe.
