This story is from Karen Inman

In St. Augustine, Florida, north of town, we have a small airport. My husband (Randy) and I had just gotten back from finally getting a bite to eat, when the wildlife phone rang. The lady on the other line began to say, “I work in the tower at the airport and one of our pilot’s has just left the runway. As soon as he got in the air he radioed back to say there is an injured raccoon laying on the side of the runway”. He told her, “I just hit a raccoon as I was leaving the ground and all I saw was the raccoon rolling down the runway. Please go out to check on this poor raccoon! I didn’t even see him before I took off!”

I told the lady that we would be there as soon as we could and just to keep an eye on the raccoon to make sure he could be found. When we arrived here was this raccoon sitting on the side of the runway, looking up at the sky. He was extremely disoriented. He had some blood coming from his mouth and runway burn on all 4 feet and different areas of his body. So, we loaded him up and headed back home to examine him better.

Upon examination we found that the raccoon was a bit concussed. The blood from his mouth was because he had bitten his tongue and he had a cut lip. It did not appear that there were any internal injuries. However, he needed to be watched for a few days.

We found out the next day that the plane had not actually hit the raccoon, nor did the pilot run over the raccoon. Actually what happened was the wheel on the front of the plane just clipped the raccoon and rolled him down the runway. I think the poor pilot was more upset about the whole ordeal than the raccoon was.

The raccoon was a young adult male, probably around 6 to 7 months old. I don’t normally name the adults that have just come in for care, unless they are going to be with us for a while. However, I just could not pass up the fact that “Runway” would be a good name for him.

Runway stayed with us for about a month, just to make sure there were no permanent injuries and to make sure that his mouth had healed and he was eating ok.

We released Runway back in the area that he came from, just not real close to the airport.