Rare raccoon?

Last night the game camera in the back yard captured 41 deer (or, perhaps, 41 pictures of the same deer; they all look alike to this semi-city slicker) and one raccoon. Deer are a dime a dozen up here in the Upper Peninsula, but raccoons? One hardly ever sees them here. At least I haven't.

Either their numbers are small or they are wizards at concealment as well as the highway scramble. Almost every day I pass either a deer or a skunk D.O.R. (dead on the road) on the way to town, but can't recall ever having seen an Ontonagon County coon flattened by a semi. (Down in southern Wisconsin it's hard to drive half a mile in the country without slaloming around two or three raccoons D.O.R.)

All of which leads me to believe the raccoon population in the U.P. is a small one compared to that in Wisconsin and even in Evanston, the Chicago burb where I winter.

Maybe the Davy Crocketts of the 19th century trapped the coons into near oblivion at the same time loggers were denuding the white pine forests.

I am ready to stand corrected, and am sure I will be.