The New Gentrifiers? Rocky Raccoon Checks Into Many Rooms

In the 1968 Beatles’ song “Rocky Raccoon,” Paul McCartney sings about “somewhere in the black mountain hills of Dakota.”

While our neighborhood is nowhere near the Dakotas, our urban environs have become a regular home for these masked mammals.

Last summer, City Kid Corner editor Christine Bush was setting up an inflatable pool on 14th Street for her family’s soaking pleasure. After what Bush described as a “CSI investigation” of sorts, she called the police.

“The two [policemen]  looked carefully at the slash marks, the cover, and the trash can,” said Bush, “before concluding that it was raccoons – not knife-wielding criminals – that took out the pool.”

Of course, raccoons aren’t limiting their visits to the outside areas of our neighborhood. The trick is that they want in — seemingly more and more often.

According to a recent article in The New York Times, “[t]he city’s 311 help line received 1,581 inquiries about raccoon control in 2015 as of mid-December, up from 936 in all of 2014, according to official data.” So why the increase of numbers? Has there been an invasion?

That same article mentioned several other instances of raccoon inhabitants — both inside and outside.

South Slope resident Wendy Hooker recently had a male raccoon removed from her yard. “They were trashing my grapevine, beating my cat,” Hooker told The New York Times. “It was like a frat party. They were insane.”

Raccoon sightings have become a relatively common occurrence here in the neighborhood. Neighbors regularly send photos in to us.

While the city has a brochure for how to deal with them, the onus is primarily on the resident to handle the issue. But given the laws in the New York City, those residents aren’t always comfortable with the raccoon’s fate after their removal. It is required that captured raccoons be humanely euthanized because they are known to carry rabies.

Malya and William Levin live on 3rd Street, just a few blocks away from Prospect Park. In a video from April 2014, Malya films William extracting a raccoon from their wall — and showing their visitor their reflection in the bathroom mirror.

More appropriate than visitor would be the term “roommate.” William suspects raccoons had been living (and dying) in their walls on and off since 2011. He finally took matters into his own hands because trappers were not having success. “The animal got used to our smells,” he says. “When a trapper came in, they would get quiet.”

It may be a bit surprising to watch the shirtless Levin handle the job himself. “It was instinct. I grew up in a very rural area in South Jersey,” he says. “We’re in the age of YouTube. I was able to identify all of the sounds we were hearing by researching online.”

Eventually, the Levins called Nice Jewish Boys Who Kill Bugs, who brought the raccoon to a rehabilitator outside of the city.

The holes that allowed the raccoons to get in were eventually repaired. And while this one building has been fixed, the much larger issue of practically addressing this complicated problem has yet to be proper addressed.

Clearly, the tendency of many residents to deal with the animals humanely counters the laws already in the place by the city. And it’s very much time for these laws to be revisited.

In the meantime, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that a raccoon and her kits (offspring) are inside an apartment wall near you.