Midnight marauder

Apparently all the food consumption and general chaos in the garden shed that I had attributed to the squirrels was, in part, the work of these little guys....

This is probably the mother raccoon.... and she appears to be looking around for her companion. He's probably still rooting around in the garden shed, looking to see what he can get in to there.

In the next shot, five minutes later, you can just barely see the curved back of the little one in the V where the two tree trunks come together.

Note on the time stamp, the two photos were taken about five minutes apart.

The last shot shows the young one (based on the skinny tail) heading over the tree.

Between the two of them they cleaned out the squirrel feeder box, which was stuffed full of bread scraps, leftover chips, and other goodies. There were two very dry hamburger buns in the basket feeder on the left side of the post, and they were gone in the morning, but are still there in the last photo so apparently they took a last turn around the buffet before giving up for the evening. I left 5 dry muffins for them in the garden shed last night and they were all gone this morning, so they are eating pretty well!

I don't leave food out every night - don't want them to get too dependent. I'm sure they visit the compost heap, and many of our neighbors have chickens, feed their dogs outside, etc. so I'm sure the grazing is pretty good around here.

So much for the myth that they need water to eat. I've never seen even a crumb in any of the outside water dishes and they seem to do a way with a lot of food without it. These photos were taken with our trail cam, which was hanging in a tree a few feet away.