"Goldfish for Breakfast", by Kerry McFall, colored pencil, watercolor, ink

Cool, cloudy mornings seem to make the local wildlife forget that, sooner or later, the sun WILL come up and it WILL be daylight.  Yesterday I was startled to see this guy finishing up his breakfast at the edge of my backyard pond, flossing his teeth with cattail leaves, washing up after a tasty breakfast of what I assume was the last of my goldfish…

Raccoons evidently have the same public relations firm as squirrels, i.e. it’s hard to be very angry with something that cute and fuzzy for long.  And he was kind enough to stick around long enough for me to track down my camera and get a quick portrait (my automatic flash actually went off, that’s how foggy and dark it was still at 8:00 a.m… is it really August?).  But it is SO annoying to have put wire over the pond and gone to all the trouble of covering the edges of the wire with moss and rocks, and to have carefully threaded the cattails and grasses through the wire, and to have placed a series of bricks and empty flowerpots for fish hiding places, only to have this joker show up once a week and wreak havoc!  Grr.

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