invader

This week, on a walk in the forest, I met an animal that doesn't really belong here. It was eating acorns and didn't care about me

 

In Germany—where the raccoon is called the Waschbär (literally, "wash-bear" or "washing bear") due to its habit of "dousing" food in water—two pairs of pet raccoons were released into the German countryside at the Edersee reservoir in the north of Hesse in April 1934 by a forester upon request of their owner, a poultry farmer. He released them two weeks before receiving permission from the Prussian hunting office to "enrich the fauna." Several prior attempts to introduce raccoons in Germany were not successful. A second population was established in eastern Germany in 1945 when 25 raccoons escaped from a fur farm at Wolfshagen (today district of Altlandsberg), east of Berlin, after an air strike. The two populations are parasitologically distinguishable: 70% of the raccoons of the Hessian population are infected with the roundworm Baylisascaris procyonis, but none of the Brandenburgian population has the parasite. The estimated number of raccoons was 285 animals in the Hessian region in 1956, over 20,000 animals in the Hessian region in 1970 and between 200,000 and 400,000 animals in the whole of Germany in 2008. By 2012 it was estimated that Germany now had more than a million raccoons (Wikipedia)

 

Olympus E-M1 Mark II + Olympus 40-150mm F2.8 + MC-14

 

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