Raccoons

NEW YORK -- The diamondback terrapin dug herself a hole in the middle of a sandy trail at the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge along the south shore of Queens and went right to work, apparently oblivious to the biologist crouching 20 feet away and trying not to breathe. In just a few minutes, she laid a dozen inchlong eggs in the hole, filled it in, danced her wide-webbed back feet on the sand to tamp it flat and ambled back toward the water. Before the turtle, a sturdy specimen with black spots on her face and a barnacle on her back, could get far, the biologist, Professor Russell L. Burke of Hofstra University, scooped her up and set her in a bucket with two others.

HACKENSACK, N.J. - Jim DeStephano worked his way down a trash-strewn creek in Lodi, N.J., stopping every few paces to peer into the shallow water. On one side of the creek was a public housing project. On the other, a packed row of houses. But to DeStephano, this was prime wild muskrat country. And it was time to check his trap line. The first few spring-loaded devices were empty. But as DeStephano came under a small bridge, a dead muskrat sagged in the water, a small steel trap clamped around its neck.

OUR NEIGHBORHOOD bank was robbed recently. It happens often, which is why I knew what was up when I saw a policeman in Linkwood Park. The cop was looking down at the mouth of the tunnel through which Stony Run passes beneath Overhill Road. "Been a bank robbery," I said. It wasn't even a question. He nodded, staring at the tunnel as if he expected the robber to emerge at any moment. "Good place to hide," I offered. (If you don't mind getting your feet wet, or the rats.) "Did he come this way?"

Anne Arundel County health officials issued a call for help yesterday in locating a young man who was exposed to rabies through some baby raccoons that he and two friends found late last month in eastern Baltimore County. Clinton Mallory, believed to be in his late teens, has been sought since Tuesday, when health officials learned that the animals had tested positive for the fatal disease. He had been living in the Brooklyn Park area, but friends and relatives have not seen him lately, said Carole Kauffman, a nurse who works for the county Health Department.

There's nothing like taking your family on a camping trip -- getting away from civilization, sleeping under the open sky, looking up into the heavens and gazing upon an awe-inspiring vista of millions and millions of ... what are those things? Bats? Very large mosquitoes? Oh NO! They've taken little Ashley! So perhaps it's better not to sleep under the open sky. But you should still go camping, because it's the best way to get close to nature, with "nature" defined as "anything you would kill if it got in your house."

A North Baltimore woman will have to endure a series of rabies shots after a raccoon bit her in her back yard. Elizabeth Knottrodt, 67, had planned a relaxing evening with a book Saturday at her home in the first block of Melrose Ave. Knottrodt said she was sitting in a mesh lawn chair around 5 p.m. when she felt what she took to be a playful paw on her back. "I thought it was the cat," Knottrodt said yesterday. "I reached around to pet it, and I felt a bite." Knottrodt said she jerked her arm forward and found a raccoon hanging from it. The animal refused to let go until her screams alerted her husband, Reinhard, who came running, she said.

They look like small brown bricks. They smell like fish. And they just might be the answer to reducing Anne Arundel County's rabid raccoon population.For the second consecutive year, the county's Department of Health will dispense Raboral V-RG, an oral rabies vaccine, throughout the Annapolis peninsula, which stretches from Crownsville, through Annapolis, to the Bay Bridge. Health department officials and volunteers plan to distribute 9,000 doses of the vaccine, which are embedded in fish meal, on Monday.

They look like small brown bricks. They smell like fish. And they just might be the answer to reducing Anne Arundel County's rabid raccoon population.For the second consecutive year, the county's Department of Health will dispense Raboral V-RG, an oral rabies vaccine, throughout the Annapolis peninsula, which stretches from Crownsville, through Annapolis, to the Bay Bridge. Health department officials and volunteers plan to distribute 9,000 doses of the vaccine, which are embedded in fish meal, on Monday.

Anne Arundel County's Health Department is searching for any residents in the Virginia Avenue area of Edgewater Beach who might have come into contact with two stray dogs that killed a raccoon Wednesday morning.The raccoon tested positive for rabies, and county officials are concerned that the disease may have been passed to anyone who touched either dog -- particularly anyone who may have touched the dogs between 7 a.m. and noon Wednesday.One of the dogs was described as a white mutt, possibly part husky and part shepherd, weighing about 65 pounds.

Good news for humankind: We're not entirely to blame for Chesapeake Bay pollution. So says Virginia Tech biologist George M. Simmons, a former Antarctic explorer who now roams the tidal creeks of his state's Eastern Shore armed with a pooper scooper.Simmons' surprising conclusion: Humans aren't always the source of the fecal coliform bacteria that contaminates some bay waters, forcing Maryland and Virginia officials to close thousands of acres of clam and oyster beds each year. Neither are geese and ducks, which often get blamed for fouling creeks and ponds.