Oakland Zoo:
Baby raccoons’ hard-luck story ends with soft landing
When Tim Eslick picked up his fully packed van from a Florida airport for a crosscountry move, he found an unpleasant surprise: His window had been broken, perhaps by an unsuccessful burglar.
As he drove, a strange clicking noise came from the back where his belongings were stashed. He didn’t think much of it.
It was only when he reached San Francisco five days later that he opened the back and discovered a much stranger surprise.
“Lo and behold, there’s six baby raccoons back there,” Eslick said. “Evidently, the mother chewed up some stuff in the back, a foam mattress, and had made a little bed for them,” probably before leaving to forage.
He put them in a cardboard box and called WildCare, a nonprofit in San Rafael that runs a hospital for wild animals. WildCare put five of the baby raccoons in intensive care: They were hypothermic, dehydrated, hungry. One had died in transit.
“It’s a miracle any of them survived, honestly,” said Melanie Piazza, WildCare’s director of animal care.
WildCare rescues about 4,000 animals a year — everything from bobcats to songbirds to squirrels to coyotes. It typically provides medical care, then releases the animals back into the wild.
But because the raccoons were brought across state lines, they couldn’t legally be released in Florida or California.
So WildCare was tasked with finding a licensed facility to take in the raccoons for a 90-day quarantine, after which they could be transferred to an educational program or wildlife sanctuary. The Oakland Zoo stepped in.
“The idea is to get them comfortable so they won’t feel like people are scary. They’re getting used to sounds, talking, new people coming and going,” said Karen Emanuelson, director of veterinary services at the Oakland Zoo veterinary hospital.
The raccoons’ enclosure at the zoo is a raccoon resort, playhouse and jungle gym all in one. The cage is strewn about with cat toys and puzzles. There are hammocks where the raccoons wrestle. The space is crisscrossed with cardboard tubes, which the raccoons scamper through, poking their heads out to sniff around.
Emanuelson said creating such enrichment environments can be a challenge for animals that are slow to figure out new things. That wasn’t a problem with the raccoons, she said.
“Every bit of enrichment we give them, they figure it out with lightning speed,” she said.
Baby raccoons are superficially adorable, but they grow up to be volatile creatures and make bad pets. (Although President Calvin Coolidge owned two pet raccoons, Rebecca and Reuben, part of an illadvised menagerie that also included a donkey, a bear, an antelope, a bobcat, and two lions named Budget Bureau and Tax Reduction.)
When the raccoons finish their quarantine period at the zoo in February, they’ll likely be placed with an educational program that teaches youngsters about wildlife.
Eslick says he’ll always have a soft spot for the raccoons. He’s also happy he took them to WildCare, which takes in dozens of raccoons every year.
“The people at WildCare, they sent pictures to us, they called me regularly — it’s just nice to know that there’s people like that in the world,” he said.
“The idea is to get them comfortable so they won’t feel like people are scary.” Karen Emanuelson, director of veterinary services, Oakland Zoo veterinary hospital