June 13, 2018
...A daredevil raccoon (click here) has been safely rescued after leaving the internet on tenterhooks by scaling a 23-floor building in St Paul, Minnesota.
The critter, dubbed #MPRraccoon after the radio station opposite the high-rise, trended worldwide on Twitter.
Crowds gathered at the building after it went viral, and local media streamed its perilous climb for almost a day.
Twitter celebrated as it reached the roof at 03:00am (07:00 BST) where cat food was waiting inside a trap.
The raccoon has been collected by animal welfare and will be released later.
Evan Frost and Tim Nelson, journalists with Minnesota Public Radio (MPR), documented the raccoon's nerve-wracking journey on Twitter.
"One of my colleagues spotted the raccoon on, kind of the ground floor, sitting on a ledge on Monday - it looked like a brown lump, almost like a cat sitting there," Evan Frost told the BBC in the early hours of Wednesday...
There is some habitat loss in the northern counties of Minnesota, but, no in St. Paul.
...Raccoons depend on vertical structures to climb when they feel threatened. Therefore, they avoid open terrain and areas with high concentrations of beech trees, as beech bark is too smooth to climb. Tree hollows in old oaks or other trees and rock crevices are preferred by raccoons as sleeping, winter and litter dens. If such dens are unavailable or accessing them is inconvenient, raccoons utilize burrows dug by other mammals, dense undergrowth, roadside culverts in urban areas, or tree crotches....
There is a good chance #MPRraccoon was scared by someone or something and climbed to a safer perch.
