Our very own Stacy Conradt has some unwelcome house guests, so naturally she blogged about it.
We saw them in broad daylight on Sunday morning – it’s a mama and three babies. I don’t know if it had been the babies’ first night out hunting or if they fell off the roof or what, but there were two of them down on the ground and one of them up on the roof. The kids were too little to get back up on the roof themselves, so the mama was down on the ground trying to help them. The one up on the roof was freaking out because everyone else was down on the ground and he was trying really hard to get down to them – at one point he was hanging off of our gutter by one paw! It was amazing. And the whole time the babies were making these cooing noises; they kind of sounded like pigeons.
The mama finally climbed our magnolia tree to get to the one on the roof and dragged him off back to their hidey-hole in our roof. Maybe I am anthropomorphizing too much, but I swear she had this attitude like, “Look, I told you to stay put. If you can’t follow instructions, I’m putting you back to bed.” It was a very no-nonsense kind of a thing. So she got him tucked away and went back to the ones on the ground. They managed to shinny their way up the fence and run along the top of it, but one of them didn’t quite have his balance so she picked him up too. They disappeared over into the neighbors’ yard and that’s the last we saw of them.
Now I've never had the pleasure of hosting raccoons in my roof (and I hope I never will), but thanks to Stacy I now know that they can't resist marshmallows: Link
And no worries... we have professionals on the case :)
As for the sounds 'coons make, the cooing is cute, but the fighting noise is terrible. More then once I've been woken up in the middle of the night by what sounds like terrible, terrible high pitched squeals and yells, almost sounding as if they came from a little dog. My blood would run cold until I would remember that it was just a raccoon, and go back to sleep. Raccoons screaming is almost as bad as peacocks screaming through your neighborhood at 3 AM. (Don't know why suburbia had peacocks flying around at night, but we most certainly did.)