We’ve got at least one racoon living in our chimney stack, which is located right behind the head of our bed. This thing is NOISY! After sleeping in the chimney all day, it wakes up around 9:00-9:30 PM with loud thumping, scratching clunking sounds as we are trying to fall asleep. Then it exits for night-time activity through a 9- inch hole chewed into the top west side of our chimney stack. About 4:00-4:30 AM, we can hear it coming back in, making a racket for a good half hour until it settles down. Then we have just a few minutes of peace and quiet until our alarm goes off. Needless to say, we are not sleeping too well these days. The pest control people have been involved for the past two weeks now, trying to assess our night-time noise problem. First they thought it was birds and/or bats in the attic, and set all sorts of “bat traps” in all the little holes of our attic, including the 9 inch hole on the chimney stack. These traps didn’t catch a thing, and the night-time noises continued and only got worse. So after more assessment, the pest control man discovered the presence of racoons. Primary evidence was the brown fir on the chimney stack bat trap hole, which had been dismantled, bent and thrown from our roof. So now we have several racoon traps located in our yard. One of these mornings, we hope to find a racoon or two in these traps. When we catch them, we can set them free in the country someplace, and then NAIL the chimney stack hole shut! Then the pest control man is going to fumigate our chimney stack. Hopefully, there won’t be a bunch of helpless baby racoons left in the chimney stack. We really wouldn’t want to “murder” them. I am trying VERY hard to remind myself that these are all God’s creatures, and also, how cute racoons are in so many children’s books. I can think of one cute racoon story, “The Kissing Hand”, which I read aloud to many children at Mercy Hospice-Johnston when I used to work there. Also, my Uncle Butch used to have a pet racoon that he caught up in Door County when I was a kid. I can remember how excited I was when he caught his his baby racoon, and how fun it was to watch the baby racoon grow up until my Uncle Butch finally set him free. Trying hard to remember these warm fuzzies:)

Next time you see a picture of this cage, it will have a racoon in it:)

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 10th, 2007 at 4:31 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.