Raccoons

About 2 months ago I saw a raccoon crawl up into the eave over the neighbors patio. Then a few days later Tessa spotted it walking across our patio while we were eating dinner.

We didn't see it again until about 2 weeks ago. I was upstairs in the shower and the kids come yelling that the raccoon was by our trash. I told Macie to grab the camera and see if she could get a pic. She took this one and then it made it's way into the trees without making too much of a mess (our garbage can was full).

Last weekend I kept being woken up in the middle of the night to bumps and noises which I thought were the kids. I went to check and everyone was still and sound asleep. All weekend we heard rustling, thumping and nails and paws scurrying around in the eaves. It was quite annoying. On Tuesday morning we were treated to a 20 minute show by a mother raccoon and her 3 babies trying to scale our screen door, jump up on on top of the air conditioner to climb up to the pipe and get in the eaves to sleep. They didn't have any luck on our side of the patio so the mom lead them the next patio over. I could just barely see her shove them up into the hole as I pressed my face against the glass.

It was so fun to watch. They didn't mind at all that we were just staring at them on the other side of the glass. It was a fascinating and neat experience getting to be face to face with these creatures.

One particular night several of the raccoons made there way into the small half wall (we are an outside unit) that houses our bath tub pipes (which has an access door into our room) about 2 feet from our bed. At 2 am those annoying babies crawled there way into the area to play or whatever and it was the noisiest thing we've ever heard. We tried banging on the wall and turning on the bathtub, but they never left or stopped making noise for more than a minute or two. Cole said he wanted to open the panel door and scare them. Not a good idea, thankfully he didn't. After an hour of unrelenting madness Cole headed to Tessa's bed and I went down stairs to the couch. I didn't fall asleep for at least another hour or more as I could still here them in the wall etc . . . I heard them in this same area several other times during the day and could even hear them meowing (is that what they do?).

The critter guys were called in to catch these guys. It took about a week and half to get them all. They tired to play nice by setting out cages, but they never got them that way. They finally had to put a trap up in the hole the coons climb in. That did the trick. Unfortunately I happened to walk downstairs two nights in a row as a raccoon got nabbed and made it's deathly screech. Kinda sad, but not really. At least the trap was by the neighbors patio door and not ours.


It was quite an eventful 2 weeks with those critters around. The kids loved it all, even seeing them dead in the trap. I'm just glad they are gone now!