Diana's Raccoon Relocation - Us or Them :-)

Aren't they just the cutest little things?

My husband and I live along the Main Fork of the Kaweah River and we have recently been bothered by Raccoon's. The pesky varmints have a path along the top of the neighbor's fence, across to our giant oak tree and up onto our roof where they make quite a racket in the middle of the night. The raccoon's get up in the oak and rip branches off the tree and eat the acorns. They drop the branches on the tin roof on our porch and our bedroom. In past years they have tried to nest on our roof and have pulled up shingles and created quite a mess.

There seems to be 3 families that visit us each night. The first family tramps around on the roof at about 9PM. The next appears at about 1AM and the third group comes at about 3AM. After a couple of years of this activity coupled with what seems to be a population explosion, we have decided either we need to relocate ourselves, or relocate the raccoon's. It's us or them!

We have put motion detector lights on the roof to see if that would scare them away. We have networked with professionals to see what they might suggest and have had no real solutions. A contractor friend suggested we install an electric fence around the roof, but we could not wrap the whole house and property with the fence so that did not seem like a solution. The most universal suggestion was to trap the raccoon's and relocate them to a wilderness area and that is our plan of attack!

We bought a "Have-a-Heart" trap at the local Mercantile and I set out to "relocate" the raccoons. This is my project as my husband is just sitting back watching to see what happens.

I am a farmers daughter from Wisconsin and these things do not faze me one bit! My father used to tell a story about pouring gasoline down the gopher holes and dropping a match in the hole and watching the gophers fly out the other end. One of my fathers friends tried that remedy and ended up burning down his garage. I hope I have better results from my endevor. I will let you know what happens.