Raccoons

It's been an unusually busy season outside my back door — three mother raccoons have turned up over the past month, each with a set of offspring in tow. (I could only tell them apart because each successive mother had one more baby than the one before.) There was a moment of concern when one set came by in the late morning — the conventional wisdom is that if you see a raccoon during the day, it's bound to be ill and probably very dangerous, though the reality (I discovered) is that they occasionally look for food during the day, particularly when they're nursing.

Baby raccoons are unbelievably adorable. This evening when I went to leave food for the birds out back I found three of them hanging over the edge of my fountain.