Quote:
I've heard bobcats twice, in two different parts of the country, and both times it scared the bejeezus outta me. I thought the same thing -- sounds like a woman or child being murdered. Horrible.
Embarrasing for me to tell the story, but yes coons do scream.
I was alone one night while my SO was at work. We live on an 80 acre farm and there are no neighbors anywhere close. Jake (the border collie) was barking his fool head off, as he usually is. Except when I told him to hush he didn't. I went out to him to see what was the matter. Jake happens to reside under a grove of very large trees. Just as I got under the canopy of the trees I heard the most gawdawful noise. I looked up and all I saw was a pair of eyes.
You can still see my handprint marks on the back door if you look real hard, cuz I hit it at a dead run.
After about five minutes of calming myself down and chiding myself for being silly, I took a HUGE maglite and went back out. There was a little bitty coon high up in the tree. Apparently Jake had treed it and scared it half to death too.
That's the night I earned the nickname "city girl" from my SO. Yes, I was dumb enough to call him and tell him about it. I'll never live it down.
I know this is coming in really late, but try to search for the sound of an opossum if you have them in your neck of the woods. They can scream like the most freakish, unearthly banshees you ever heard.
We have a raccoon named Mary living in the same barn where we have our coop. She makes all kinds of noises, from mews and coos to bird-like bawks and barks. There's a high-pitched call that resembles a scream, she makes that if she's annoyed at one of the feral cats with whom she shares cat food.
Mary helped us to predator-proof the coop as did our 25-30 feral cats. !cool
We have cooh dogs that we hunt with and they make all sorts of gog-awful noises. Depends on if it is a male, female, female with babies, or juvenile. If it got caught in the=at electric fence you got, I bet it was really howlin and would be why you say it beatin feet in the drainage ditch! The coon is why your hound wouldn't come in. Even if he was never trained to hunt, it is still in his blood to sniff them out and eatem up!
My daughter came in from walking the dogs and told me that there was something "screaming" in the woods. We took our large spotlights out and found two coons up a tree, that I assume were either mating or fighting. It was a really weird, screaming, screeching sound. I guess the lighting, that we provided, ruined the mood and they stopped, and tried to hide (at least until we departed).