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Mobbed by Raccoons

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A retired Mountie in Nova Scotia has turned his back porch into the most popular raccoon buffet on the internet.

On a snowy November night in Pictou County, Nova Scotia, James Cecil Blackwood Jr. sat down on his back porch with a bucket of food and got swarmed — happily. Known online as the “Raccoon Whisperer,” Blackwood has spent roughly two decades feeding the wild raccoons that live near his property, and the footage from that particular Tuesday night shows why people can’t stop watching. Somewhere between 25 and 30 plump, well-fed raccoons crowd around him, standing on their hind legs and taking hot dogs and grapes right out of his hand.

• The video, titled “Mobbed by Raccoons (25) Tuesday Night 03 Nov 2020,” shows at least 25 to 30 raccoons converging on Blackwood’s porch during a freezing, snowy night.
• Blackwood fed the group eight pounds of hot dogs plus bags of grapes, explaining the raccoons were fattening up for winter.
• The footage went viral in November 2020, racking up nearly 10 million views within its first two weeks online.

Two Decades of Nightly Feedings

Blackwood’s routine didn’t start as a bid for viral fame. According to his own account, his late wife, Jane Wylie, began caring for and feeding the local raccoons on their property back in the 1990s, long before anyone was filming it. Before she died of cancer in 2003, she asked her husband to keep looking after the animals — a request he’s honored ever since, feeding the raccoons hot dogs, peanut butter sandwiches and fruit on a near-nightly basis.

That commitment is what separates Blackwood’s videos from a typical backyard-wildlife clip. This isn’t a one-off encounter with a curious raccoon rummaging through a trash can — it’s a two-decade-long practice tied to a promise, carried out in all weather, including the kind of snowy, sub-freezing night captured in this particular upload.

The Camera Reveals Objective Reality

The video itself is straightforward: Blackwood sits outside with a bucket on his lap while raccoon after raccoon climbs onto the porch, waits its turn, and takes food gently from his hand. There’s no chaos, no aggression — just a rotating cast of raccoons that clearly know the drill. Some stand upright begging, others sit patiently a few feet back waiting for their turn at the hot dogs and grapes.

Blackwood said the raccoons were especially eager that night to stock up on calories ahead of the harsh Canadian winter.

That detail matters for anyone wondering why so many raccoons would show up at once in the middle of a snowstorm. Raccoons don’t hibernate the way bears do, but they do put on significant fat reserves in the fall and reduce their activity during the coldest stretches of winter, holing up and living off stored body fat. A porch offering eight pounds of hot dogs in one sitting is, for a local raccoon population, about as good as calorie-stocking gets.

From Backyard Ritual to Internet Sensation

Blackwood has posted these feeding sessions to YouTube regularly for years, but this particular clip broke out in a way his earlier uploads hadn’t. Landing nearly 10 million views in its first two weeks after posting in November 2020, it turned a quiet Nova Scotia backyard ritual into a piece of viral content shared well beyond raccoon-enthusiast circles. The appeal is simple enough to explain: dozens of raccoons taking snacks politely from a man’s bare hands is the kind of footage that doesn’t need a hook or a narrator to hold attention.

The clip sits comfortably alongside other animal-encounter videos that have found audiences for the same reason — genuine, unscripted moments between humans and wildlife tend to travel fast, the same way clips like wildlife swarming abandoned city streets or a teenager’s close call with a massive sinkhole have shown, generating attention less through production value than through the sheer novelty of what’s on screen.

Blackwood has kept posting these feedings since, and by all indications he has no intention of stopping — the raccoons, after all, keep showing up on his porch every night whether the cameras are rolling or not.