So we think that we have raccoon problems. Here is a blurb written by a friend on Facebook today about her raccoon troubles.
"Damn raccoon was in the house 'again' last night. He comes through the cat window which needs a computer chip to open it but the little devil with his little devil hands pulls the window out and comes in to check out the food......and is quite upset when we try to get him out."
She lives north of Montreal in St-Sauver which is the heart of the ski country in the Laurentian mountains. Over the last couple of years she has posted pictures of the raccoons going through her garbage and in her yard.
Post from Grace
I remember when I had a house with a cat door, in came the raccoons, climbed the basement shelves to the foil packets of cat food, slit them open and neatly left the empties. They then went to the top shelf and pushed a 5lb glass jar of mayonnaise to smash on the concrete floor ! Now the little dears test the ripeness of our mangoes by putting teeth marks in each one.
ReplyDeleteThanks Elaine. It is a good thing that people here don't have little dog or cat doors but with all the dogs we have you never know what the future will bring.
ReplyDeleteIs protection from raccoons part of homeland security?
ReplyDeleteThe fruit trees in addition
ReplyDeleteto those that choose to feed
the feral cats are in fact
our Racoon population's
Best friends.Once we lost
our fruit trees,(Orange &
Loquots) we also lost our
ring tailed friends.
In back of our house up north, which bordered woods, we had a big heavy plastic trash barrel. Some animal (we assumed a squirrel) gnawed a 3-inch diameter hole in the tight-fitting cover, but we left it that way because the hole was never enlarged and a minimum of trash got strewn about. (Why buy another barrel, only to have another 3-inch hole gnawed through the cover?)
ReplyDeleteOne evening, about to lift the cover to put trash in, I saw what I thought was a bushy tail disappear down the hole—but then I thought my eyes had been playing tricks on me. I lifted the cover, using it to kind of shield me in case an animal jumped out. Nothing at all happened, but I did think I heard the slightest scurrying sound in the rubbish for a second. Everything was so quiet, however, I thought my ears must have been deceiving me.
I waited and waited--and nothing, not a sound. I almost reached in to pull out some of the rubbish to investigate and make sure, when I thought better of this procedure and instead tipped the barrel to empty the contents onto the ground. Out with the rubbish scampered an opossum, who headed for the woods!
Why in the world had he been so quiet in the barrel after I had taken off the cover, I wondered? Then I remembered my childhood Thornton Burgess books: playing 'possum, of course! Just the way the famous author had described him.