RICHMOND, Maine — Last month, Richmond police received reports that two goats climbed on and damaged a car. This time around, the vehicle vandals came from the sky.
Richmond Police Chief Scott MacMaster said residents have complained that a raven has done hundreds of dollars worth of damage to three vehicles in town.
“I actually can’t talk about it any more, because the attorney for the goats called and complained that the raven was getting too much press,” MacMaster joked.
“The first incident happened on May 21,” he went on. “A gentleman came into the lobby [of the police station] looking for information about whether he could dispatch this raven. He estimated it had done about $500 damage to his truck by scratching the finish work, damaging windshield wipers and tearing out the rubber seals around the windows and doors.”
The following day, another man who lived approximately a half mile from the first complainant came into the station and told police his car was in the shop after a similar raven attack, and the blackbird was beginning to target his rental car as well.
MacMaster said witnesses described the raven landing on the vehicles and doing “a territorial-looking strut” across the shiny surface.
“When the reflection the bird was seeing did a similar strut, he started reacting by attacking whatever he could get his beak into,” the police chief said.
In the previous case of the goats last month, a pair of Marston Road goats reportedly got loose from their yard and climbed over a neighbor’s car, MacMaster said. In that case, the goats’ owner agreed to pay for repairs to the damaged car.
But it will be difficult to get any money from the raven, which seems to have taken his angry rampages elsewhere, the chief said.
“We haven’t heard that they’ve caught up with it, but we haven’t had any more complaints,” MacMaster said.
Perhaps the most vehicle damage caused by an animal in Richmond recently came Tuesday night, when a moose got on Interstate 295 and caused a tractor trailer truck to swerve off the road. The crash sent the driver to the hospital with what police described as minor leg injuries, but the truck’s trailer smashed open, scattering its load of potatoes along the highway.
