It was a lovely boating day, a little windy, but not too choppy in Jewfish Basin because it never is. We pulled up next to one of the small mangrove islands, I put the engine in neutral and sat listening for a while for a mangrove cuckoo. Sadly, none chose to either call or appear. But when I looked up I caught sight of one of those great but occasional Florida wonders – an American flamingo standing on a sandbar about a quarter mile away.
Damn, I’m a good naturalist, I thought, as I pointed it out to Tara and Matt, long-time friends down visiting from the great state of South Jersey. There are few greater wildlife experiences in Florida than seeing a flamingo in the wild.
And then I raised my binoculars and realized it wasn’t a flamingo, but a PVC bubba stick painted pinky-orange right next to a large trap buoy painted also pinky-orange, the two objects lining up from the angle we were looking at them to form the exact same shape as a distant flamingo.
One of the more salient tricks I learned back when I was working as a birding guide is that if you make a mistake, you try to point out something else interesting as soon as possible as a distraction and, you hope, a memory eraser. And fortunately a lone dolphin making its way through about four feet of water swam slowly along our port side, crossed our bow, and kept going.
In the Mud Keys we also failed to find a mangrove cuckoo, but we got to hear singing Caribbean yellow warblers, as well as singing gray kingbirds and singing red-bellied woodpeckers, at least if you can call the strident hyper-syllabic utterances of those last two species singing.
We ran the boat up onto the beach of the westernmost island of the Mud Keys and dropped an anchor on the sand in case the tide was rising. Then we sat under the Bimini eating Pub subs and oranges. Another boat pulled up to us, picked up two pieces of trash and maybe a bucket of sand, then left. A foursome of boaters from the other beach on the island emerged from a path at the edge of our beach, flopped loudly into the water, and started to circumnavigate their way back by wading, disappearing behind the curve of the mangroves.
We all swam around for quite a long while, experiencing the unpretentious thrall the backcountry always induces.
We were back on the boat, drying off, when the raccoon approached.
There has been a lot of raccoon coverage in the news this week, the vast bulk of it focused on one raccoon in Seattle dubbed Jimothy, who kind of looked like a chupacabra if a chupacabra was re-conceived as an adorable plush toy with a bandit mask. It is thought that Jimothy had something called short spine syndrome, which essentially truncated his torso by about a third, but gave him a look that has somehow warmed the hearts of millions of people online.
The raccoon on the island wasn’t the polar opposite of that, but he was on a very different end of the heartstring-pulling spectrum.
He was small, skinny, blond like our mutual friend Clark got when he worked summers as a lifeguard and swore he wasn’t putting lemon juice in his hair every day. He stared at us unabashedly with what we read as a certain type of longing.
He really knew how to work a room. Or at least a beach.
Matt wanted to feed him, possibly take him home with us, possibly buy him a matching suit of clothes for group photos.
I read the book “Rascal” by the author Sterling North in my youth. It was about a boy and the young raccoon he trapped, then befriended, then lived with for about a year until the family realized that raccoons actually aren’t great pets, and they returned him to the wild.
I’m not sure if Tara ever read the book, but we were both of the opinion that it’s a bad idea to feed wild animals, no matter what kind of soft feelings they can inspire with their open-eyed stare, no matter how much they present as a perfectly formed guilt machine. And taking him home and subjecting him to human haberdashery was certainly out of the question.
The way he approached us, though, no doubt someone had been feeding him.
It is a little unclear how many types of raccoons we have in the Keys, or at least how many subspecies.
In the 1930s a paper was published identifying three subspecies of raccoons in the Florida Keys. (There was also a fourth one in the Everglades and 10,000 Islands.)
The Inesperatus subspecies, with the Latin meaning “unexpected,” more commonly known as the Matecumbe Key Raccoon, had a range that stretched between Key Biscayne and Upper Matecumbe. The Auspicatus subspecies, with the Latin meaning “auspicious,” more commonly known as the Key Vaca Raccoon, had a range that ran from Lower Matecumbe down to Key Vaca, in the heart of Marathon. And the Incautus subspecies, more commonly known as the Torch Key Raccoon or the Key West Raccoon, which two translation websites tell me the Latin means “incautious,” or “careless,” while two other translation websites tell me it means “unsuspecting,” had a range that stretched from Big Pine to Key West.
By those definitions it was a Torch Key Raccoon that was attempting to befriend us.
In 1989 Dr. James “Skip” Lazell, after much blood testing and skull measuring, published a book identifying three different types of raccoons in the Keys – the Florida Raccoon, a subspecies found in the uplands of the Everglades and some of the larger islands of Florida Bay; the Marine Raccoon, a species found in the sawgrass of the Everglades and the mangrove swamps of some of the smaller islands in Florida Bay; and the Key Raccoon, a subspecies found on the mainline Keys and out islands from Grassy Key south.
So by those definitions it was a Key Raccoon that was attempting to befriend us.
It is thought by some that the Torch Key/Key West/Key Raccoon is paler than its mainland counterparts in order to not absorb the heat of the sun, and skinnier, because they don’t need the fat to stay warm in the winter. But I couldn’t find any research to document those notions.
Regardless, the raccoon out in the Mud Keys retreated to the shadows, sat down and watched us as we backed the boat off that beach and headed out towards the gulf.
A few minutes later, having found the Gulf a little rough, we passed the beach again. Matt said something about how the raccoon was probably still sitting there, sad and disappointed that we hadn’t picked him up, or at least fed him. (It’s possible I made that bit up about him wanting to buy the raccoon a suit of clothes. But I know he would totally do it given the chance.)
