[URBAN NOTE] "Midnight marauders"

[rfmcdonald]

Sarah Elton's cover article in last week's issue of The Grid, "Midnight marauders", takes an extended look at Toronto's raccoons.

There’s no official city count, but scientists with the Ministry of Natural Resources estimate that there could be as many as 100 raccoons per square kilometre living in the city—so many that Toronto has been unofficially dubbed the raccoon capital of the world.

In 2012, Toronto Animal Services responded to 8,529 calls from the public about raccoons—mostly about dead animals that people wanted city workers to remove, the rest being sick or injured. The highest concentration of raccoons exists in the old City of Toronto, where higher densities of humans mean more garbage to scavenge.

[. . .]

So, why Toronto?

Well, technically, they were here first. “This is the raccoon ecosystem,” says Suzanne MacDonald, a psychology professor at York University who specializes in animal behaviour. MacDonald studies raccoon psychology and is currently researching their problem-solving abilities to figure out how they break into our garbage and birdfeeders. “The urban environment we constructed suits them just fine,” she says.

Unlike cities such as Montreal, Edmonton, and Ottawa, Toronto winters are milder and we typically don’t get buried by the kind of snow that makes it hard for raccoons to forage. The city’s network of ravines also connects neighbourhoods, MacDonald says, which offers raccoons a safe place to retreat, if necessary. And unlike Vancouver (where, historically, there have been more condo buildings in the downtown), Toronto has residential neighbourhoods with leafy backyards, garages, and easy access to garbage. Urban raccoons have flourished here because of their ability to adapt to our environment, forage in our waste, and find shelter in easy-to-break-into older downtown homes.

MacDonald says that, while we think we frequently come into contact with raccoons, we’re mostly unaware of their movements. She recently set up night-vision webcams in a friend’s backyard, near High Park. In one night, she documented more than 50 individual raccoons travelling through his property.