Raccoon Adventures…
Living on the edge of town overlooking a river gives you ample opportunity to see wildlife. Most of the time, that’s a good thing.
My mother gave me a bird feeder with a camera for my birthday this year. It gives an up-close look at the various birds that populate our backyard. The first bird spotted was a chickadee that had an attitude problem and didn’t like to share. My eldest (Tyler) decided the bird behaved like Napolean. This made us laugh so we (mostly our youngest, Zach) gave each species at our feeder a nationality: the titmouse was England, bluejays were Russian and the cardinals were the Papal state.
We were humming along nicely, watching videos of our feeder, until one fateful night, a raccoon had the audacity to eat the entire contents of our feeder in one go. This means that I had short videos all night long of this snuffling greedy creature pawing handfuls of birdseed into its gob.
I was ticked….
I showed Jeff the footage and asked him what we should do about it. He wasn’t sure and said he would think about it. Well, that “thinking” lasted a week until the crafty raccoon not only ate my birdseed, which I was smart enough to only put out a handful at a time, so the birds had a chance to get a bit, but also managed to snuffle up some of Jeff’s newly planted potatoes from the garden.
Well, THAT did it….
Jeff decided that he had “thought” enough. It was time to take action.
He talked with our friend, Ray, who has a massive garden and is familiar with the machinations of raccoons. Ray loaned us 3 traps and instructed Jeff to put marshmallows in the cage, as they seemed to like those better than anything else. Jeff tried orange halves, at first, because we had them on hand. He caught one with that, but the other cages weren’t touched.
He purchased marshmallows which did the trick. He caught several more right away with those.
You may wonder, “what do you do with a caged raccoon?” That is an interesting question.
The first one we caught was small and very cute. I felt sorry for him, so I made Jeff throw some birdseed in the cage for him while we worked out how to deal with him. Jeff wasn’t overly happy with me for that. Eating birdseed was one of the reasons we needed to get rid of raccoons.
The next several ones we caught were mean. I stopped feeling sorry for them at that point.
After these lovely little creatures were trapped, we had to haul them somewhere at least 10 miles away. Ray told us that if you don’t take them at least that far, they will find their way back, and we didn’t want that!
We don’t have a truck, which means we would have to haul these beasts in my SUV since it is the junkiest of our vehicles. We were advised against that by Ray as the raccoons tear things up and make gross messes. I certainly didn’t want that!
Ray and our other friend Terry offered to help us out. Sometimes Ray would pick up the furry-filled cage and haul it far away from us and from HIS garden. Other times, Terry would help us out.
When Terry came to help, he and Jeff would load the thing in the back, drive it to an undisclosed location in the country, and then battle to get the beast to leave the cage by opening the cage with a golf club.
As I stated earlier, some of these creatures were mean. Jeff and Terry didn’t want to get close to those chompy sharp teeth.
This method seemed to work well. We’ve relocated 16 to date. But I’ve seen 2 on my camera recently so we aren’t done yet.
Terry has recently been given an official relocation t-shirt courtesy of Ann and Ray. It has a truck with a raccoon in it, a cage with a golf club, and a tiny opossum peeking around a tire. It says, “Terry’s Relocation Services”. Ann and Ray’s daughter-in-law made it. We all thought that was one of the greatest T-shirts ever.
The opossum was added to Terry’s shirt because we have also caught several of those, but we just open the cages and let them go. They aren’t a nuisance, and they keep bugs in check. I will say, they aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed. One stayed in the cage for hours after Jeff opened the door before crawling out to the entrance and then resting there for much of the day. I kept looking outside at it and texting Jeff to say the idiot creature was still there. It finally wandered off in a leisurely manner.
I should add that the raccoons are the pirates of our ecosystem and Zach named the opossum “Cromwell” in keeping with the historical theme we started with the birds. It’s a cheap form of entertainment around here and with all of the extra cash going to house renovations, we need cheap.
I’m hoping we don’t have to catch and release for the rest of our lives, but if we do, we have some awesome friends willing to help us out, one of whom has an official relocation shirt! You never know what activities will bring people together! I’m guessing that Terry and Ray prefer our themed dinners to the raccoon adventures, but you never know….
