Q. A couple of years ago you wrote about our backyard hummingbird feeders in Clarksville, Tennessee. Our backyard is an open area bordering woods that harbor wildlife, including raccoons. We bring in the feeders every night because the raccoons raid them. This year the raccoons have changed from their typical nocturnal behavior, and whole families now raid our feeders during the day! These wily mammals have changed their strategy entirely in response to ours. Is this unusual for a wild animal to change its behavior so dramatically?

A. After years of working with animals large and small, I have seen many instances in which individuals or family groups adjust their behavior to accommodate a new situation. Sometimes it is baffling how they know what to do. Very little surprises me anymore with a creature as versatile as a raccoon.

Typically, raccoons come out mostly at night, partly because they don’t want to deal with people, who are out mostly during the day. In your feeder circumstance, at least one raccoon family has decided (not for us to know how) that the opportunity to drink sugar water outweighs the risk of encountering a human. A shift from daytime to nighttime behavior, or vice versa, is a common phenomenon with many animals.

Evidence of an awareness by whitetail deer that hunting season has begun has been documented in South Carolina, where putting out corn to attract deer before and during the hunting season is legal. In the study, deer came to the corn day and night prior to hunting season. The hunters’ plan was that once hunting season starts, they would be easy prey. However, the deer had a different plan. As soon as the legal season opened, the deer became entirely nighttime corn eaters. How did they know it is illegal to hunt deer in the state at night?

One of the most spectacular examples of behavior adjustment by wildlife I have ever observed personally was by a flock of geese. We lived adjacent to the W.K. Kellogg Bird Sanctuary in southern Michigan where as many as 7,000 Canada geese spent the summer. Each morning, we were regaled by dozens of V-shaped flocks of these magnificent birds as they left Wintergreen Lake in the sanctuary to head to various feeding sites. Then came early fall when goose-hunting season opened, before most of the geese had headed South for the winter.

Michigan goose hunters are a clever bunch, and some took advantage of the enormous concentration of ready-to-be-shot fowl that left the sanctuary every morning. Some hunters would decry the lack of sportsmanship shown whereas others might think it was ingenious. But either way, here is what I saw. When driving down a road that bordered one edge of the sanctuary, I had to stop because dozens of pickup trucks were lined up along the shoulder. The trucks were not the problem. It was the hunters with raised guns that stood beside every one of them, Each of these guileful wildlife stalkers was carefully concealed behind the cab of his truck, gun pointed toward the boundary fence geese would have to fly over to leave the sanctuary.

I watched a flock of about 50 geese as they headed toward the fence from Wintergreen Lake, flying low, 80 feet above the ground. Perfect for a goose hunter. When the point of the V was a hundred yards away from the boundary line and the waiting arsenal, I calculated that roast goose would soon be on dinner plates of many area residents. Then a remarkable thing happened. The leader of the flock took a sudden sharp turn upward, the rest following. Up and up they went to a height of perhaps 700 feet as they cleared the boundary. Shots were fired, but all in vain. The geese were too high. As they waved goodbye I did not wonder who had outsmarted whom. Animals can be smarter than we think.