I know, it doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, does it? Anyway. We’ve had raccoons living in our roof since at least last summer. They peeled back the flashing and got in there somehow. Paul thought he had the problem fixed, but they’re back this year. When he took the dogs out Friday night, he looked up and saw those flashy animal eyes (you know what I’m talking about) peering down at him and said it was rather creepy.
We saw them in broad daylight on Sunday morning – it’s a mama and three babies. I don’t know if it had been the babies’ first night out hunting or if they fell off the roof or what, but there were two of them down on the ground and one of them up on the roof. The kits were too little to get back up on the roof themselves, so the mama was down on the ground trying to help them. The one up on the roof was freaking out because everyone else was down on the ground and he was trying really hard to get down to them – at one point he was hanging off of our gutter by one paw! It was amazing. And the whole time the babies were making these cooing noises; they kind of sounded like pigeons. The mama finally climbed our magnolia tree to get to the one on the roof and dragged him off back to their hidey-hole in our roof. Maybe I am anthropomorphizing too much, but I swear she had this attitude like, “Look, I told you to stay put. If you can’t follow instructions, I’m putting you back to bed.” It was a very no-nonsense kind of a thing. So she got him tucked away and went back to the ones on the ground. They managed to shinny their way up the fence and run along the top of it, but one of them didn’t quite have his balance so she picked him up too. They disappeared over into the neighbors’ yard and that’s the last we saw of them. Did I mention my dogs were going freaking nuts this entire time? We have windows along that whole side of the house and the fence happens to be about two feet in front of them.
Paul had been staying that if he saw the raccoon he was just going to go out there and kill it. Apparently he has no issues doing such a thing and once heroically fought off a rabid woodchuck as a kid. Or something. You’d have to ask him about it. Growing up out in the country must have been pretty interesting.Anyway, once he saw there were babies involved (they were SO CUTE), he was no longer so confident in his raccoon assassination abilities. We broke down and called a pest control place. For the BARGAIN BASEMENT PRICE of $450 (UGH), they came and set humane traps at our house. Once the critters are caught, they will be released out at Saylorville Lake and the pest people will screen up the area the coons were living in to make sure nothing else gets back in there.
Which brings me to my fascinating fact of the day: apparently raccoons like marshmallows, because that is what the pest people are using as bait in each one. I did a little research and apparently they especially love wet marshmallows. They also adore sardines, but cats aren’t attracted to the scent of gelatinous blobs like they are attracted to the odor of oily fish, so it lessens the likelihood of catching the neighbor’s Persian.
We were really expecting to find raccoons in one of the traps this morning, but nothing yet. If we get one of the babies I might just sneak it into the house and see if Paul notices. We already have three four-legged creatures ruling our roost… surely one more won’t really make a difference :)
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1 comments:
I have heard that raccoons sometimes get into chimneys and build nests that are so hard they must be jackhammered out, so I do hope that you get your hole in the roof and the raccoons sorted out. I also think you should anthropomorphisize all you want, raccoons have prehensile thumbs that make it look like they have tiny human hands for goodness sake.
I live on a wooded creek and one of my elderly neighbors feeds the raccoons in the area. I have heard she has many visiting, and we get to see them go by the raccoon highway that is my backyard often. Over the past few years we have been in this house we have seen momma and baby raccoons come through and they are very cute. I think of them as my outdoor pets that I don't feed or encourage, yet I still have to pick up their poop.
The problem, if you even think of it as that, is manageable now. I just worry that when my neighbor needs to move out of her house as she gets older that the previously pampered and fed raccoons will suddenly turn into an enraged mob and boil out of her yard to take what they can from the surrounding area, unfortunately that's me.
(FYI, the correct collective noun for raccoons is a gaze of raccoons)
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