Er, boss... there’s a raccoon by my window
MOST office workers might expect to see nothing more on their window ledge than the odd pigeon.
So when a raccoon appeared many floors up on the outside of a 25-storey building in the US, it became an instant celebrity.
The furry mammal was spotted on the high-rise UBS building in St Paul, Minnesota, on Tuesday.
Crowds, some with binoculars, gathered in the square below to watch as the raccoon scurried up and down the building, occasionally pausing to rest on window ledges, to the surprise of workers inside.
Local media broadcast its perilous antics for almost a day, making it an internet and Twitter sensation – something of a change for an animal usually regarded as a pest for its habit of going through rubbish bins.
Evan Frost, a journalist with Minnesota Public Radio which is based opposite the building, said: ‘One of my colleagues spotted the raccoon sitting on a ledge. It looked like a brown lump, almost like a cat sitting there. Two workers got out a couple of long planks, making a kind of ladder for it.’ But the initial rescue attempt failed and the raccoon was scared upward. It then spent most of the day climbing up and down the building.
In the small hours, however, the raccoon was eventually caught at the top of the structure. Animal welfare teams captured it in a live trap filled with cat food and later released it into the wild.