A Cry in the Night

A sudden sob broke the night. After a pause, the dogs of the neighborhood began to bay—first the yellow Labrador across the street, then other dogs whose voices spread out into the distance like ripples from a dropped stone. The sobbing that provoked them did not stop. It was a liquid clatter, its tempo rising and falling but always loud.

It roused my wife and me from our midnight drowse. The windows were open to the cool. The milky moon was already high enough to shine in the west window. I looked out for a clue. The pines stood silhouetted and silent.

Soon, the kids woke. I told them it was some hurt animal, but that was all I knew. As I watched, a yellow tomcat emerged from the woods, slipping away low to the ground. Having gained the meager shelter of our tomato plants, he paused and looked back. A guilty look, I thought. Had he done violence to something? But really, he seemed as spooked as the rest of us. The racket had gone on for several minutes. I heard a neighbor open his back door, and somewhere else, someone hushed her dog. No matter how hard I stared into the dark woods, nothing seemed to move.

Oklahoma Today's September-October cover illustration by Madelyn Goodnight

I went to my back porch to listen. The sob had changed now; slowed. Something was still alive and in pain.

“It was like those sounds we used to hear,” my wife said the next morning.

“What sounds?”

“The ones that weren’t owls.”

I remembered them. We had heard them in the spring, when we began, after a winter’s hiatus, to leave our windows open at night. They were soft question marks of sound, one or two long syllables at a time. The discussion of them had always run about the same, though we switched roles for repeat performances:

“What was that?”

“The dishwasher.”

“Not that. The other thing.”

“It sounds like an owl.”

“Sort of, but not really.”

These episodes seemed relevant to the current mystery. I felt certain that the non-owl of spring had been living in peace, doing whatever it was he did; but now, on the verge of autumn, he’d fallen victim to violence. I walked the woods behind our house in search of clues. Everything looked the same as usual. I found the chewed scrap of a deer’s scapula, but its crust of lichen showed it was old. A blue jay complained and went flittering ahead of me, suspecting me of bad intentions. I got no answers.

Scout is one of the residents at the Bernice Nature Center at Grand Lake State Park. Photo by Saxon Smith

If the woods weren't talking, maybe the library would. It supplied me with a cassette tape of wildlife sounds. This was a few years back, before the internet was so well stocked with sound files and videos. I hunched in front of the stereo. I heard the menacing grate of the bullfrog, the surprisingly chicken-like alarm call of the whooping crane, and more. And then: the noise of raccoons fighting. It was exactly the racket we’d heard in the night. Even the pauses were right.

The softer, questioning sound turned up on the tape. Here’s how naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton described it: “In the black woods, on still nights, I have often heard it, a long-drawn, tremulous Whoo-oo-oo-oo. This is the ‘whicker.’ It is often . . . confounded with the call of the screech owl.” My wife was right to connect this owl-like whicker to the wild racket that woke the neighborhood. Both are raccoon sounds. So are growling, hissing, and howling.

Illustration by Madelyn Goodnight

So the answer to the noise in the night turned out to be a species I—and probably you—have seen many times. Science tells us raccoons thrive especially in the Cross Timbers, the Rorschach blot that bisects the state. There, they can nest in the blackjacks and scrub oaks, which people rarely cut for timber, and hunt along creeks in the tallgrass prairies. The ideal nest, and one of the reasons hardwood forests suit raccoons so well, is a cavity within a tree. In such a cavity, a sow typically bears three or four young. They emerge with their eyes closed, like kittens. By two months old, they’re ready to follow their mother on foraging expeditions.

But the fact is, raccoons do fine in the entire state, ecologically diverse as it is. They turn up, for example, in the Red Slough marshes of our southeast corner and in the treeless stretches of the Panhandle, where they nest in culverts, woodpiles, or abandoned barns. I’ve seen them on highways and country roads from Weatherford to Westville, standing their ground on the shoulder, unimpressed by cars. Lit by headlights, their eyes blaze like a jack-o’-lantern’s.

They show up in diverse circumstances too—in residential Oklahoma City and in fields of corn and peeking out of irrigation pipes. I’ve seen mothers in my yard, leading their kits to rummage through a garbage can or walk a fence like cats. I’ve noticed their comma-shaped scat in the woods and seen them high in a pine.

The reason they can live almost anywhere is that they’ll eat almost anything. Or, as the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation puts it, they have “an opportunistic appetite.” In the spring, a raccoon’s diet is more likely to include crayfish, insects, ground squirrels, and mice; in the fall, fruit; in the winter, acorns. But if they’re handy, the raccoon will eat cottontail rabbits, bats, brown rats, roots, baby rattlesnakes, leaves, twigs, sunflower seeds, duck eggs, mussels, minnows, turtles, birds, lizards, opossums, and stuff it digs out of the dumpster behind a fast food joint. In the cool of the night, it will dig up the nests of ground wasps, eating the soft larvae, plucking the adult defenders out of its fur and crunching down on them too. Raccoons may belong to the order Carnivora, but overall, they usually end up eating more vegetable matter than meat.

Little Bit is another raccoon resident at the Bernice Nature Center. Born from an albino mother, Little Bit retains partial pigmentation, known as leucism. Photo by Saxon Smith

The word raccoon comes from the language of the East Coast Powhatan people and means “animal who scratches with his hands.” It probably refers to the way they paw over the crayfish they catch, fondling them in the water like dirty dishes. (The artificial conditions of zoos made us mistakenly believe, for several generations, that they bring all their food to wash.) But there’s more to know about those extraordinary hands.

It used to be said that the human hand was unique, that it allowed us sole mastery of tools, that the brain that evolved alongside that dandy hand explained why we’re so smart. This model isn’t wrong, but it’s simplistic. Other animals can manipulate objects with their front paws—monkeys and other primates, rats, even opossums. Some of those animals lack opposable thumbs, but they can manipulate objects anyway. Among its carnivoran family, which includes bears, dogs, skunks, and even walruses, the raccoon is unusual in its hand skills.

A raccoon groping a riverbank for a crayfish moves a lot like a person. Having got hold of the crayfish, it turns it how it wants. Thumbless, it can hold the critter between its fingers or by pinching it between fingertips and palm. It can even roll the prey between its palms without using its fingers at all. It likes to keep the crayfish underwater while it takes a good grope, because the water softens the tough outer layer of the skin and heightens the perceptions of its already sensitive hands. It may have located the crayfish by sight in the first place, but for gaining a real 3D picture of it, it uses the hands. The raccoon isn’t really washing its food. It’s analyzing, understanding all the contours. It breaks off the parts it doesn’t want, such as the shell of a turtle. In short, its hands are less for handling than for sensing. The tactile awareness takes up approximately 60 percent of the sensory part of its brain.

And as many homeowners who have tried to lock up the birdseed can tell you, it’s highly intelligent, a master at solving latches. Scientists say it’s smarter than cats and dogs. A friend of mine who kept raccoons as pets told me there was no point hiding her jewelry. They’d find it and open whatever it was in. She could retrieve it later from their den above the ceiling.

A raccoon’s dexterity has limits. If it wants, say, some hanging fruit, it reaches like a little child, with both hands. It’s less skilled than we are at making the two hands do different jobs. But it’s much better than we are at navigating in the dark. The hairs on its knuckles are sensitive—like the whiskers of a cat. They can identify objects the raccoon doesn’t quite touch.

Illustration by Madelyn Goodnight

The only mystery left in that wild clatter we heard is its timing. What did the raccoons have to fight about in the fall? Noises like this are more likely to happen during mating seasons. In Oklahoma, that’s typically the first three months of the year.

A sow will mate only once a year, during an estrus of three or four days. She prefers the boars who win the fights, usually the biggest. A fight can last a shockingly long time. The boars bite, and they sometimes throw the foe with their mouths. They turn those sensitive hands to violence. They claw and scratch. The wounds they gouge can kill; hence the cry.

While raccoons run wild across Oklahoma, there are several places to stop by and meet the critters face to face. At the Tulsa Zoo, guests can see a raccoon in the Life in the Forest building, which specifically features animals that have unique adaptations to help them live in forests. There also are two of these fuzzy, masked bandits located at the Bernice Nature Center at Grand Lake State Park. Both of these raccoons, named Scout and Little Bit, are animal ambassadors for Oklahoma State Parks.

See Oklahoma Today's exclusive interview with Bernice Nature Center raccoons Scout and Little Bit:

Written By

Gordon Grice