I’ve been spying on my neighbors in San Francisco. Here’s what happened the night one of them discovered my camera.

San Francisco’s South of Market district has become increasingly… let’s use the words fecal and needletastic this time. Anyway I left. For Noe Valley.

I now pay $2050 per month for a century-old studio with a hilariously slanted floor and, on average, $600 per month for free street parking. But the upside is the neighborhood, and the best part of the neighborhood is the neighbors. (Except the neighbor who had my car towed.)

Yes, the lady who runs the flower shop is surprisingly enthusiastic, and the guy at the cheese shop probably has a PhD in cheese. The four-to-six humans who share my building seem genial, actually make eye contact, and I think one of them even remembers my name. When I was taking out the recycling on Saturday, two different neighbors separately said “hi” to me over their backyard fences despite never having met me before. I was bewildered.

The most interesting neighbor so far, however, has been the one that — I’m pretty sure — lives under the stairs.

One of the first things I bought when I moved in was birdseed. I can’t exactly call it a deck, or even a porch, but there is a small platform outside my back door at the top of the stairs. I couldn’t stop myself — there was birdseed on the rail before I even phoned Comcast and PG&E. I’m a sucker for dinosaurs.

Delicious?

It can take several weeks for birds to start noticing a new feeder. And since I don’t actually have a feeder yet and the birdseed is the same color as the rail, I wasn’t expecting much. For the first few days, I would put the seed out in the morning, go to work, come home, and check to see if the seed had been eaten. It had not. However, by the next morning, it was gone. Something was eating it at night and it was not birds.

This is when I decided to get a camera trap. A favorite tool of wildlife researchers, these weatherproof, motion-sensing cameras are about the size of a pack of tarot cards and can capture thousands of daylight and infrared images of squirrels before their six double-A batteries run out, or the SD card fills up, whichever comes first. Specifications vary.

On the first night, hoping to discover the culprit, I intentionally left the birdseed and a bit of cat food on the rail. (I startled a cat in the backyard once and hoped to win its affections. I’ve not seen it since, but it would be a shame to let the kibble go to waste, right?)

Here’s who showed up.

Interestingly, the word “raccoon” comes from the Proto-Algonquin root “ahrah-koon-em,” which means “the one who scrubs and scratches with its hands” (thanks Virginia C. Holmgren via Wikipedia). This one appears to be foregoing its species’ legendary table manners in favor of sucking food into its face like some kind of animal.

On the second night, I geniusly dropped the SD card into the backyard, searched for it with a flashlight for half an hour, found a slug, felt foolish, and eventually gave up.

But on the fifth night, after my new SD card arrived, my masked neighbor appeared once again.

The latin name of the raccoon, Procyon lotor, references a star only 11.45 light years from Earth. We’ve been led to believe the name was chosen because raccoons are nocturnal. Not because they’re secretly space invaders.

Yes, what you just witnessed was a creepily-intelligent being realizing something in its environment is amiss.

Then it did this:

While raccoons are considered an “animal of least concern” by conservationists, they categorically resent that phrasing and would like to remind us that they’ve lived in North America millions of years longer than humans.

The rest of the night’s observations feature my neighbor’s deck furniture. Which, unsurprisingly, was also visited by our procyonic acquaintance.

There are over 20 subspecies of trash panda. While not true pandas, they are more closely related to the charismatic black-and-white bears than to dogs, cats, weasels or Oscar the Grouch.

On a side note, if you recognize this deck furniture, you now know who to blame.

Hey look, a bird!

If you live in… actually anywhere… and find animals in and around your home, you can document them on iNaturalist where the image recognition tool and lively community of naturalists will help you identify it. Plus, you’ll be helping science. If you’d rather lurk, you can follow my own wildlife observations from Noe Valley and beyond at https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/tharkibo.

Also please note that I’ve not actually been spying on any human neighbors, as that would be both illegal and incredibly uncool even for San Francisco.