Social climber
Racoon scales skyscraper in Minnesota, becomes internet sensation as people watch in amazement, terror.
At first, it looked so defeated: Its head buried between its front paws and its body curled up on a ledge 20 feet above a street in downtown St. Paul, Minn. But this was a raccoon, after all — part of a deceptive and unpredictable family of nocturnal mammals whose panda-like looks lull humans into forgetting they can carry multiple diseases.
Nonetheless, three maintenance workers shortly before noon Tuesday thought they could rouse the raccoon from its stupor and offered it a ladder to climb down from the ledge.
It was the start of a mesmerizing escape — captivating people in Minnesota and then nationwide on Twitter.
The raccoon, clearly not ready to give up and not a fan of ladders, jolted from the recess of the building, dug its long fingernails into the tan exterior and scurried over to another side. It started to climb and climb and climb.
The St. Paul raccoon scaled the two-story building with ease. But there was a bigger challenge ahead: the UBS Plaza, a 25-story office tower and St. Paul’s 15th-tallest building. Within minutes, the raccoon had ascended five stories.
“Well, it’s out of the frying pan, into the fire for the #mprraccoon,” Tim Nelson, a reporter at Minnesota Public Radio News who chronicled its adventure, tweeted with a hashtag that became a trending topic on Twitter.
About 10 minutes later, the raccoon was pressed against the 12th floor, now a mere dark spot between two windows more than 100 feet above the street.
Then the raccoon reached the 15th floor and then the 20th.
While it’s normal for raccoons to climb 20 to 30 feet, scaling a large building is very unusual, said Russell L. Burke, a biology professor at Hofstra University.
“That kind of height is extraordinary,” he added.
By the time the raccoon reached the upper stories, it had an audience.
Gawkers flooded the streets below UBS Plaza. Some brought binoculars. A girl clutched a raccoon stuffed animal. A marquee on Minnesota Public Radio’s building across the street flashed the breaking news: “St. Paul’s downtown raccoon reaches new heights.”
Inside the tower, employees pressed their faces against the windows hoping to catch a glimpse of it. On the 23rd floor of UBS Plaza, Sheila Donnelly-Coyne, a partner at Paige J. Donnelly, a St. Paul law firm, huddled with her co-workers and started to chronicle the raccoon’s journey. Their thoughts raced. Who will rescue it? Will it fall?
It showed up around 3 p.m. and started pacing on a thin window ledge outside Donnelly-Coyne’s office. It took a nap. “He just seemed sweet and cute and very mellow,” she said in an interview Wednesday.
Breaking out a window or sending down window cleaners would have been too risky, Donnelly-Coyne said, so officials baited live traps with cat food and placed them on the roof. They hoped the smell would lure the raccoon up another two floors.
Donnelly-Coyne stayed in the office until 9 p.m., taking breaks from her work to check on it. When she left, she said, the raccoon was curled up sleeping. “All they could do was put enough stinky food up there to encourage him to go up the last two floors,” she said. “We were all kind of worried he might be too tired to do so but thankfully the little guy kept going.”
The raccoon awoke around 10:30 p.m. and apparently had a change of heart. It started to descend, down to the 18th floor and then the 17th, before stopping on another ledge.
A photographer at Minnesota Public Radio zoomed in and saw the raccoon peering over the ledge. Maybe it saw the cheering crowd below. Maybe it thought the descent was too far. Either way, around 2 a.m. Wednesday, it began another climb.
It surpassed the 18th floor and then 19th and kept going and going. Around 2:45 a.m., according to Nelson, it scaled the top and hopped onto the roof. It also found the cat food inside the trap.
Wildlife Management Services, the company that set the traps, retrieved the raccoon Wednesday morning, said Laurie Brickley, a spokeswoman for the city’s Department of Safety and Inspections.
The raccoon was a female about 2 years old, Brickley said. “She was a little skinny but in good shape,” she added.
By the time the team reached her, she was “incredibly tired,” and had eaten all that was in the live trap and had drank a lot of water, Brickley said.
When asked where the raccoon had been released, Brickley declined to answer, saying only that she had been sent into the wild. “This raccoon needs peace and quiet right now,” she said.