It's raccoon time again

The backyard of my house on Allen Street is like a jungle. In the daytime, besides the dozens of varieties of birds, squirrels, chipmunks and groundhogs romp with impunity. But go out there at night with a flashlight and you are liable to run into more than you bargained for. I have seen opossum, skunk, and raccoons and heard reports of weasels and mink. And I'm sure I'm leaving something out - like maybe snakes.

Last night there were two loud crashes out on my back deck. It was about 4:30 a.m. It sounded like the recycling bin being overturned. It was loud enough to wake the whole family, which then gathered by the glass sliding door with flashlights. Nothing. Usually, when we hear a noise like that, I'll turn on the outside light and I'll find a raccoon, or a mother and two or three kits, eating something we forgot to bring inside. They will sit there and stare at me like I'm making a big deal out of nothing. They don't leave until I yell at them. And then, only reluctantly, will lope down the back steps and into the darkness of the yard beyond.

If I didn't keep a backyard flock, I probably wouldn't be concerned. But this week, on four separate occasions, we spied a raccoon inside the chicken run in broad daylight. Each time it was about 6:30 p.m. The funny thing was, he (or she) was apparently not after the chickens. It was eating their feed as the goundhogs often do. The first couple times the chickens raised a fuss. But after that, they got used to him, as they have with the groundhogs, and continued to go about their business of scratching and pecking, while he dined on layer formula and cracked corn. He even drank up their water.

Every time I went out to chase him, he disappeared as if into thin air. We checked the perimeter and the netting over the top and could not find a hole big enough for him to enter or leave. We were baffled. And he kept coming back. Finally, I saw him go out through a hole you wouldn't imagine a rat could fit through. We blocked it up with heavy cement blocks and were sure he couldn't get in again.

The next evening at 6:30, Amy looked out the kitchen window and screamed, "The groundhog is in with the chicks." (She got a little confused in the excitement.)

Having been thwarted in the big chicken run, the raccoon had resorted to raiding the improvised run I had created for our six four-week-old pullets. When I looked out, he was chasing the chicks around inside the fenced-in area. Fortunately, they were all able to escape through the hole he had dug under the fence and were soon out in the backyard. As I ran out in my bare feet, the raccoon squeezed through the same hole, climbed the seven-foot-high wooden fence that surrounds our yard, scampered along the top and jumped to the safety of a tree, which he then climbed to the top. New precautions were taken to keep him out. The noise on the deck last night..? Retaliation, I am sure.

Yes, its raccoon season again! Last year wasn't so bad. But the year before, I ended up putting extra locks on the coop, after several close calls due to some very clever break-in attempts. The back door to the coop now resembles the door of a New York apartment. I had bandits on my deck every night that spring.

I first got wind of what we were in for this year when my neighbor, Mike Zwart, recounted a few weeks ago how a raccoon had gotten into his attic via the louvers in a decorative cupola, then ate a hole in his roof to get her kits out after she gave birth in there.

After my experience with the "broad daylight bandit," I called my expert on all things chicken, Nick Ormes. He was full of reports of raccoons raiding barns and coops and even bird feeders and eating suet left out for wild birds.

"Yeah, its that time of year again," he said. "The mothers are out looking for food for their babies."

I expect that in another couple weeks those babies will be old enough to travel with mom and I will find them up on my deck again, getting their lessons.

"Now this is where he leaves the sweet corn, and this is where you might find a cantaloupe he has forgotten to bring in," she will tell them. "Oh look, there's a trace of tuna in that can in the recycling bin."