I've come full circle

It's week three in my new apartment set up on good ol' Martin Luther King Jr. Way. As I said earlier in a previous post, it is certainly a different kind of neighborhood. No more street parties for the kids on Hillegass Avenue. No more visits at my front door from 'Crazy Mike' with his radiation reader. No more views of Lew and Amy with their enormous earphones on. It's good in a way to be in such a different environment.

There is, however, one thing that remains constant in the short relocation to MLK Jr. Way. That constant, of course, is the presence of the infamous procyon lotor, otherwise known as the urban raccoon.

My encounters with the coons are to be different now. In my second floor apartment (I live in a small 3-unit building - two one-bedrooms on the ground floor, and our three-bedroom unit on the second floor) I do not hear their scrambling and carrying on in the crawl space. As well, since we have no pets or outside feeding dishes, I do not hear them pilfering Emily's cat food anymore around 1:45 a.m. Apartment life is good in that way...fewer foraging beasts to irritate you. However, my neighbors with free standing (and for a good part, disheveled) homes still face the same challenges to their management and abatement as I knew on Bateman Street.

Today, for instance, I was walking north on Ellis Street after a casual 3 mile run through Berkeley. Despite the overwhelming volume of my ipod device, I heard a familiar noise which caused me to take a pause and check my surroundings. The noise I heard was coming from two raccoons, recently trapped, sitting outside 3143 Ellis, a drabby beige Victorian with purple trim. They looked and sounded awfully dismayed. They were even using their tiny raccoon thumbs and hands to try and manipulate the door on the traps that caught them.

I decided that I would do the only thing a citizen of Berkeley, CA should do at that moment: call animal control and involve myself needlessly in a situation that appeared pretty much under control. I felt bad for those critters, and I was hoping I could find a way to assist their lawful release. Hell, now that I am on the second floor (safe from their wrath) I can now help my former enemy escape. Karma, people.

I called "Animal Services" and the dispatcher assured me an officer was going there right away. I asked if trapped raccoons are by default the responsibility of the City. She replied "No, not all the time." Therefore, the coons would likely not find freedom today.

An hour later I got a call back from the officer who did the site visit. Apparently, the coons were caught in humane traps by a licensed animal control company and they were awaiting pick up and release. She was kind of annoyed they were trapped and she told me she wanted to release them there but the tenant refused.