This night-vision camera remix shows a clever Raccoon stealing a woodpecker suet feeder by holding on until it - and he - falls to the ground. That's a drop of about 7 feet. He then carries it off into the forest to figure out how to open it. Not high on style marks, but it works. I managed to recover the empty feeder down by the stream.
I knew he'd get the first two biscuits easily and probably the third - but the fourth and hardest (biscuit #1 in the photo above) - that's tough. There were two ways to get it - one would be to just walk the rope down from biscuit 2 and grab a hold of it - the second would be to slide the hanging rope with loop that held biscuits 3 and 4 down the horizontal rope and pull it down to within reach. Several times in the video the Raccoon sees the relationship and causality between the hanging rope and the last biscuit. Lowering the rope just an inch or two and he would have easily gotten the final biscuit. Pretty impressive determination in any case! Of course, if Raccoon's had any vertical jumping ability it could be gotten, but I'm not sure they can jump up off their hind feet. If anyone knows different let me know - may be a matter of practice - OMG if they could learn to jump vertically what would that mean?
