We call them “the common raccoon” which makes them sound ordinary. I would like to submit to you that the “common raccoon” is anything but ordinary.
My personal experience with raccoon’s was expanded greatly from 1999 thru 2005 when I operated my nuisance wild life removal business, Dave’s Nuisance Wildlife Removal Services (kinda long I know, but Critter Ridder was already taken) in four counties of North Central Wisconsin.
I had started out like every other guy when I began fur trapping.
You know, fitting a nice hobby in and around raising a family, working and volunteering for little league. So I had these grandiose thoughts in my head after watching Jeremiah Johnson one to many times, of learning to trap everything from muskrats and beavers to raccoon’s, fox and “ye ole’ Wile E. Coyote, Super Genius!”
But I never made it to the Rockies, not yet any way and never set a trap for ole’ Wiley and I ended up focusing my endeavors on skunks, bats and the “common raccoon”.
These three animals make up the bulk of most modern day nuisance trappers business calls.
Skunks and bats just freak people out, “Get it out! I don’t care, just get it out!”, said just about every house wife when they called and depending on how much damage a raccoon or family of raccoon’s made would determine the tone of the call for each said complaint. And let me tell you, a raccoon can literally destroy your house if given enough time.
The more calls I went on the more I came to appreciate God’s little masked bandit.
Procyon lotor, (Linnaeus 1758) loosely translated means “before the dog”. I do not believe in Darwin’s “theory” of evolution but am thoroughly convinced that there is a heavenly creator using an intelligent design.
And one day he created the raccoon.
The size of a raccoon ranges from kitten size at birth to the size of the neighbors forty pound Springer Spaniel next door. The largest raccoon I ever got was around thirty eight pounds and came out of a swamp next to a corn field and farms where he had access to a lot of grain. Most adult raccoons average in the twelve to fifteen pound range and twenty pounders can be found but that is rare enough, much less almost forty. It really depends on the age and quality and quantity of food available and also… the absence of any people trying to get rid of it.
My experience with raccoons and their feeding habits has led me to this conclusion… a raccoon will eat anything that he feels is edible and that won’t eat him first. Ever been camping and have your cooler cleared out? Ever have the cat dish on the back porch cleared out? Was that porch enclosed? They are omnivorous and sneaky to boot. Raccoon’s have a very sensitive detection array. Starting with their ears, hunting rodents at night their ears can pick up the very smallest of rustling a mouse or vole makes. The face is the face of a predator with eyes placed to the front and have built in night vision (for twenty interesting facts go to www.pest-control-products.net) along with very sensitive whiskers and a great sniffer.
I have seen them find and clear out turtle nests that are buried deep in the sand. I have also witnessed on more than one call where the home owner didn’t know how they got into this or that space “it had a closed door on it!” but the raccoon can learn how to operate door knobs, latches, levers, zippers and the locked cooler with a brick on top of it.
That leads us to their “hands”. The front paws have four fingers and a thumb and are used to learn what things “feel” like so that they can remember later what is edible, you know a marshmallow feels different than say, a cob of corn, but both are delicious, good to know, right? The experts say that is why they “wash” there food, their hands help them learn. They clean the piece of food off so that they can “get a feel for it” literally! Remarkable!
Raccoon’s are the good Lords first contortion artist as I have seen them in every part of a house and even had one gentleman call and say ” I have a raccoon stuck in my chimney!” “Sir” I answered “she is not stuck, raccoon’s don’t get stuck.” He asked “How do you know it’s a she?” I answered “It’s that time of year, she either just had her kit’s or is getting ready to, do you have any funny smells around the fireplace?” He put the phone down but was back in a jiffy. “It does smell funny, we never use it and we keep it cleared out.” “Well” I said, “what has happened is that she set up shop and with the smell, has been there awhile and most likely has some babies in there.” He proceeded to hire me.
Now they can turn knobs and levers but the number one way a raccoon can get into a home is through some sort of construction failure. A rotten soffit, missing siding or a broken attic screen in the vent area of the roof provide all the wiggle room they need to gain entry. But I did have a job where the female just ripped an aluminum framed window right out of the side of the house and made her own way in. Just tore it right off! You could see where she grabbed an edge of the frame, braced her back feet and yanked and yanked until the window came out. Remarkable!
Which leads us to their strength. They are strong, not even joking! A twelve to fifteen pound raccoon could kill just about any dog, even a good coon dog doesn’t come away unscathed. The next time you are able to, run your fingers around the face of an old red bone or blue tick hound and feel the battle scars around the ears and eyes. The raccoons strength and the seeming ability to turn around in their own skin is just remarkable.
When I started removing nuisance raccoons as a service, I caught more in town than I did in the woods but folks in town get mighty squeemish when you tell them “per the DNR regs. I have to euthanize them.” So to save some cash like all ‘newbs’ to service work I built my own euthanizing pole designed to hold a syringe, instead of buying the $100.00 machined aluminum unit that the real pro’s were using, there is a reason a pro is a pro (little tip o’ the cap there). Well sir, I had an opportunity to try out my new hand made rig of bamboo and pvc, kinda proud of it, and it worked on the canvas dummy in the garage, not so sure now that the canvas dummy was the real dummy. So on the next call, I went out, removed the offending critter from the nice ladies house and when I was well away from the neighborhood I pulled off the road and went to work setting the trapped raccoon up for a peaceful sleep.
When an animal is in a cage trap you can walk them to the back of the trap using a sturdy divider made of welded quarter inch rebar (this was store bought and worked flawlessly) so I was able to move the raccoon to the back of the trap and restrict it’s movement inside the cage, or so I thought. It looked real good, the raccoon had it’s butt pushed up against the outside of the cage and we were ready. But as I moved the homemade syringe euthanizing pole into the cage, I had barely broken his fur line and that raccoon to my very astonished, surprised, jolted amazement, did the one and only real life impression of the Looney Tunes Tasmanian Devil that I have ever seen. Inside that two inch space of cage, he spun and spun, grabbing the pole out of my hand and buzz sawing the syringe end to absolute smitherines, and it was making all those Tasmanian Devil noises, it scared the crap out me and I hoped he couldn’t get out of that steel cage!! Did I say they are strong? Oh yea, their strong! On another job the female had been in the house so long that she ripped cupboard doors off of hinges and ripped furniture up while using a nice leather chair as a toilet.
The females are pretty savvy when protecting their young, aggressive when needed like any good mom is, but mostly they hide the kits out of site and reach and come back later to get them. On more than one occasion I used that loyalty against them. If the female is not in the building but you find her kit’s, usually in the insulation somewhere, you can use them to lure her into a cage trap herself and take care of the whole family.
That always made me feel bad.
As I went on removing more raccoon’s I just had a deep appreciation of their remarkable qualities. The number one quality that impressed me the most was their ability to adapt to any environment that held even the least bit of cover and food. They just take advantage and exploit their surroundings. I actually appreciated that so much that I applied it to my life. I try to stay as adaptable as I can in my surroundings, to keep my eyes open for opportunity, to be flexible. “Keeping my nose to the wind..”, so to speak.
The raccoon at the time of Columbus was not as wide spread as it is today. But as agriculture took hold and moved north so did the raccoon, from barn to barn and hay stack to hay stack. As it happens though, some wisenheimer decided to export some to Europe and Japan, see the character ‘Rascal’ from 1977. Now some eons old Japanese temples are in peril of falling apart due to raccoons moving in and destroying rafters and beams with there feces and urine. And I quote:
“Which brings us to perhaps the most infamous raccoon issue in Japan: temple damage. It’s estimated that some 80% of Japan’s temple architecture has experienced some kind of damage from these masked bandits.” www.tofugu.com Rascal’s Raccoon Invasion.
I grew very fond of raccoons while I provided the service to remove them from homes and businesses. The population is actually exploding in some parts of the country. Urban sprawl in an attempt to provide green space for neighborhoods, plays right into the raccoons frantic little, frog washing hands, as this leaves plenty of tree’s and hidey hole’s for cover and dens and garbage, lots of garbage, to feed off of.
So, like in baseball when a player makes a great play and his opponent “tip’s his cap” in admiration and respect, I tip my hat to a very remarkable creation of God that was able to teach me so much about trapping wild animals in town that I will always appreciate the not so common, but very remarkable Procyon lotor!
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