…this time last year we discovered a similar visitor in our backyard

Some of you may remember the racoon we found in our deck box last year. We managed to get a couple of photos before it scurried off and never returned. All spring we’ve had a heavy metal pan sitting on top of the box so we figured that would be enough of a deterrent to keep the racoons out of the box.

When our dog Frances started to get excited and agitated around the outside of the box this week my husband suspected that the racoon had returned. We took the dog back into the house and quickly the racoon escaped. When we opened the box we found another surprise.
The mama returned shortly after but she wasn’t sure what to do.

We called Animal Control and they told us to make the area very uncomfortable by playing loud music, especially at night, and throwing in some dog fur into the box. The one thing not to do is add moth balls because they are too toxic for the babies. Apparently racoons have more than one den site so the theory is that the mother will take her babies somewhere else.

We were all set to do that but my husband didn’t want to wait until nightfall so he started by opening the box all the way. Again the mama racoon scurried away. It didn’t take long before she returned and one by one she removed her babies and waddled across the deck and the backyard, up the chain link fence and into the neighbours yard. We were afraid she was going to move into our old garage or crawl under our deck but I guess one of her other den sites is in someone else’s backyard.