Raccoons can be incredibly pesky and hard to get rid of, even a dead one.

Few animals have better adapted to city life than raccoons, which are experts at prying open composting bins for a stolen feast, with the leftovers usually scattered on the street.

But when a raccoon dies and won’t go away, like the one wedged into a knot hole in a tree on Wendover Rd., near Bloor St. and Prince Edward Dr., it is a baffling nuisance.

“This is an odd one,” said Jamie Deans in an email, explaining a raccoon died in a tree on the boulevard in front of his house.

Deans said he phoned the city’s 311 service and asked for someone to be sent out to remove the corpse, since the tree is on city property.

“They said only if the raccoon was accessible without using a ladder,” he said, adding he was told to try using a stick to poke it out of the tree, then knock it into the curb, where it would be picked up.

Why not give it a try, we asked. “It’s really stuck in there, and I just don’t want to be poking at it,” said Deans. “It could be diseased.”

We weren’t sure what he meant when he said it was stuck, so we went to check it out, figuring we could use a hockey stick from the trunk of our car to extract it.

Of all the strange things we’ve ever seen, this is among the weirdest. The raccoon’s head is sticking out of a knot hole about eight feet up the side of the tree, its masked, furry face upside down, as if it is lying on its back.

It looks like it got wedged in the hole and twisted itself around to escape, but became fatally stuck. Perhaps it was a tubby victim of too much good food.

The cold weather seems to have perfectly preserved the head, and likely the rest of the body inside the tree. Attempts to poke at it will be met with icy resistance.

Someone will have to get up there and dig it out, or it will remain until spring — staring down at the sidewalk — when it will finally decompose. Yuk.

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STATUS: Eletta Purdy, manager of Toronto Animal Services, said she thinks they were called about it a week ago and suggested a call to urban forestry, which will remove a dead animal from a tree on city property. An animal services staffer will be sent today to have look, said Purdy, and will contact urban forestry if the tree is on city property.

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