A raccoon with a view
A raccoon that became an internet sensation by scaling a 25-storey office tower in downtown St Paul, Minnesota, was safely trapped yesterday and released back into the wild.
The raccoon looked a bit bedraggled but healthy after it was caught atop the UBS Plaza. Technicians took the caged raccoon down a freight elevator to a truck, according to Wildlife Management Services, which provides animal control services for St Paul.
“It’s definitely a healthy raccoon. It’s in good condition. It’s eating normally,” said Christina Valdivia, the company’s general manager, who accompanied the technicians to the rooftop.
The raccoon’s adventures caused a stir on social media as it scaled the tower on Wednesday.
The animal made it to the roof yesterday, where traps baited with cat food were waiting. The raccoon, a female, was released later in the day and scampered into a wooded area on private property near the Twin Cities suburb of Shakopee.
Suzanne MacDonald, a raccoon behaviour expert at York University in Toronto, said: “Raccoons don’t think ahead very much, so raccoons don’t have very good impulse control. I don’t think the raccoon realised when it started climbing what it was in for.”
Initial speculation was that the raccoon climbed to a lower part of the building, frequented by pigeons, in search of bird eggs. But workers who tried to lure it down with a wooden ramp likely just scared it, said Phil Jenni, executive director of the Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre of Minnesota.
So it did what raccoons do when they’re stressed: it climbed.
It’s not unusual for raccoons to climb fairly tall trees and other structures, according to MacDonald and Jenni, though neither had heard of one climbing such a tall building before.
MacDonald said one raccoon grabbed attention in 2015, after climbing 213m up a construction crane in Toronto. It safely climbed down on its own.