We caught another raccoon this morning. That makes two this year. We didn’t mind so much when we had a fairly large one hanging out in the area and eating the dropped pecans, as he soon learned our schedule and avoided us. That was our first summer here. Last year I don’t recall any problems with them. Then, this past winter, we had one sharing the barn cat’s food, which we really didn’t mind. It didn’t wreck anything and it didn’t eat ALL the food ALL the time. Which brings us to this summer.
We have had up to 5 raccoons around this summer, including a mom and 3 babies. Once we started seeing her, the other two adults stopped coming around, which was nice except the little family absolutely trashed our garage/shed and would eat 4 cups of cat food every night. When we started putting the food away at night (in my car) and put all the bags of horse and cat food in my car as well, they just trashed the shed some more even going so far as to go into cabinets and puncture bottles of vinegar and floor cleaner. They also started coming up on the deck and eating the suet from the bird feeders which was a problem since Scott gets home at 1 am, and it is not pleasant to find raccoons on the deck in the dark. He tried shooting them with our bee-bee gun, which sort of worked in that they did leave but they came back the next night.
To help us get rid of them, we called some wildlife eviction specialists, Advanced Wildlife Control. They only live trap and they relocate instead of euthanizing. They have also been incredibly friendly to us. They put out four traps around the yard/barn/house area for 4-5 nights, and we only caught one raccoon, one of the babies. Well, we also caught several cats, Sister at least twice, Tex once, and Pearl at least once. They didn’t seem to mind too much (except Tex who is a bit skittish to begin with), and we would just let them out when we found them.
After having no further success with the traps, we decided to just wait and see if they came back and try to trap them in the shed and then call the guy to use a catch pole. That was nearly 3 weeks ago. We finally caught one early this morning, and the guy from Advanced came out and caught him. He said it was a young male, quite possibly one of the babies from earlier, who probably just got kicked out by mom. He also said that this was probably his territory now, so with any luck (though we’ve had a shortage of that) we shouldn’t have anymore raccoon troubles until at least next year. Here’s hoping!