Name that creature!

This is the side of our house. It appears that giant pipe carries rain water from the roof so our home doesn't fold in half like wet newspaper.


Check out those black smudges all the way at the top of the pipe.


What ARE those things...are those...



...wait...are those FOOTPRINTS?!?!?



Why, yes. Yes they are.
And they wrap around EVERY pipe like this around our house...probably a dozen of them.

It took me the LONGEST time to figure out what these were. I immediately thought of monkeys, but the footprints are wrong. They look like CAT paw prints. Those are just TOO oddly placed to be cats. Then, one day Michael saw one of these on the wall around our house:


And it all fell into place.

Wait, what? What IS that thing???
Are you telling me you'd never heard of a civet? Me neither. So I looked it up on Wikipedia.

WIKIPEDIA says: "Civets are omnivorous, supplementing a meat diet (both hunted and scavenged) with fruit, eggs, and possibly roots." Of course, it's Wikipedia...so I had to find a better source.

And I did. HERE.
This site says the civet "stalk their prey and pounce on it from a hiding place in the underbrush." Great. Good to know they have a perfect hiding place ON MY ROOF. The site also calls them "timid creatures" that prefer the "flight" of the Fight-or-Flight instinct. Unfortunately, that provided little reassurance a few weeks ago when one of them crawled up on the roof at night (apparently they ARE nocturnal creatures) and crawled around for a good 1/2 hour. Normally I wouldn't have a problem with this, but:
a) I still haven't seen the civet(s) so I have no idea how big it/they is/are.
b) This was pre-Google search so for all I knew they could eat babies for brunch.
c) The noise this civet made crawling across my roof at night was disturbingly similar to the sound a dead body might make as it was drug right over my head on the roof. *shudder*

Actually, now that I think about it, that doesn't make sense. These guys are more cat-like and would prowl lightly on their padded feet. Maybe it had killed a chicken and was dragging that? Man, that would have to have been one BIG chicken. Shoot, there goes my civet theory. Gulp...what if it was a snake??? That would have to have been one BIG snake. *bigger shudder*

We have a contractor coming to fix a leak in the roof tomorrow. Maybe I should warn him first...