Those of you who read last Friday’s post will know that my home has recently been invaded by a pregnant female raccoon and her eventual babies. We called American Animal Control who sent Mike out to seal holes and set traps. Thinking “Rosie the Raccoon” has been barricaded in our attic, we’ve been waiting for her to emerge and be trapped and taken to a new home in the country. After over a week of waiting, David finally made a Raccoon sighting on Sunday night…. BUT, Rosie was not where we expected to see her. When David came home that night he saw her sitting on the fence. With a sinking feeling, we realized that Rosie might not have been trapped INSIDE the house with her babies, but rather OUTSIDE trying to get to them. Boy did we feel like schmucks!!! I started to get really worried that the babies (who had been noticeably quieter this week) were dying in the attic above my kitchen. My mind instantly filled with gruesome images of dehydrated youngsters weakly calling for their mother. Were they already dead? Were they rotting in my attic? I felt sick to my stomach, convinced we were horrible people.

Dave and I had a long conversation that night about what we should do. Since it was almost 10pm on a Sunday night, we decided to wait and call in the morning and ask the animal removal company to come out and remove the babies. When I spoke to Mike from AAC in the morning, he agreed to come out that afternoon. He let me know that he’d use the babies as bait for a trap, so that he could trap Rosie and reunite the family before he would take them all away together. It sounded like a reasonable plan, so I anxiously waited for him to arrive and begin the process. I cleared the bedroom closet so he’d have plenty of room to work and I nervously strained to try and hear any baby noises. I was convinced they had perished. I was convinced I was a terrible torturous murderer. I was imagining two tiny bodies clinging together wasting away. It was awful.

Mike from AAC arrived around 2:00pm and came to the back door. He was presumably checking the trap on his way in. His arrival made Lucy, our neurotic black lab, go berserk! Visitors never come to our back door, so it was apparently a bit of a shock for her. It literally took me several minutes to get her calmed down. I had to laugh thinking, “Sure! You bark at him, you bark at the mail man, you bark at any bicycle or school child that passes the house, you bark at squirrels in the yard… but you completely ignore the critters running around right above your head. Way to go guard dog! Way. to. go!” But, I suppose she did a little better than Cody though, who permanently looks like this…

I ushered Mike upstairs and showed him where we had been hearing noise. He listened for a while and didn’t hear any purring or chirping, so he began to cut a hole in the wall. After chizzeling through a layer of drywall and a layer of  lath and plaster he pointed a flashlight through the hole. He declared the insulation “shredded to bits” but still couldn’t see any babies. He knew they weren’t within arms reach, so he’d have to go spelunking to get them. We don’t have any access to that part of the attic, so I gave him permission to cut a hole large enough for a human and we determined that we could eventually put a small door there for future attic accessing needs.

Mike set to work with his saw and I headed back downstairs to work on editing photos. About five to ten minutes later I heard him hollar “MARAH!!!!!!!!!!” I ran upstairs sure he’d been attacked, shocked, or cut somehow. I’m pretty sure I even grabbed my cell phone as I catapulted upstairs. You know, just in case… (Side note: Mike- guy I just met- pronounced my name correctly with zero coaching. Holla!)

I breathlessly arrived in the bedroom and Mike flourished a metal cage at me and announced, “Congratulations! You have the biggest litter of the year!” “How many were there?” “EIGHT!!!!” “How many are alive????” “All of them!!” “WHAT?!?!?!?” I couldn’t believe it!! There were six more than I anticipated, based on the noises we’d been hearing… and none of them had died in a week without their mother??? How on earth did they manage that?

As you may remember, I thought I was hearing 2 or 3 kits. From what I had read online, most raccoons only have between two and seven kits in a litter. Sometimes only one kit. But eight? EIGHT BABIES!!! Rosie might have been the wrong name. Clearly we should have named her Fertile Myrtle, or Octomom. YES, Octomom! Perfect! I had named the two I thought I’d been hearing Rascal and Rogue. I immediately mentally set to work naming the rest. Rascal, Rogue, Rocco, Raul, Ridge, Reno, Romeo, and Roxy sat blinking, wiggling, purring, and chirping in a small cage. They were a little smaller than kittens, and seemed pretty helpless. Mike pointed out that some of them were still hadn’t opened their eyes. They snuggled together and rolled and squirmed as close to each other as they could. David was right… they were cute.

Mike again shared the game plan with me. He was going to use a few of the babies as bate and try to lure poor, lost, pathetic, trapped outside, pining for her babies- Rosie. I hoped that she would return to her poor starving babies soon. I knew they were resilient, but I wasn’t quite sure HOW resilient. They hadn’t eaten in a week! I’m no vet, but I think it’s safe to assume they can’t go too much more than a week without food, right?

I headed back downstairs while Mike patched up the hole and took the babies out to his truck. He pulled about three out from the litter and put them in a smaller cage to use them as bate to reunite mother and babies… trap style! Once they were all together, he would take them to a nature preserve and release them as a family. The babies definitely weren’t ready to survive without her, so we knew we’d need to trap her soon. The hope was that the cry of the babies would lure her that very night.

Mike headed up to the roof to set the trap and I was, again, editing in the dining room. I had just settled in and gone through about three images when I heard his ladder scrape against the side of the house, and heard the thumps of him heading up to the pitch over the kitchen. I almost had a heart attack when I heard him hollar (much louder than the first time) “MARAH! MARAH!!!! COME HERE!!!!!!” Needless to say, his tone got me outside faster than lightning. (with cell phone in hand) I thought maybe he found bats, fell off the roof, or for some other gruesome reason needed me call 911… I was expecting something awful. When I turned and looked up to the roof, I was not prepared for what I would see. There in the original trap gazing at us with terrified eyes was Rosie. She HAD been in the attic. I was bewildered. Mike was bewildered. It was all so strange!

I had to feel some relief that Mike had not been attacked or bitten by Rosie when he went in to get the babies. He left our bedroom more than once to get supplies and Rosie didn’t take a stroll INTO the house. But still… how was she in there? David had seen her outside the night before. How did she get in??

Mike tended to the trap and removed it from the roof. Rosie, meanwhile let him know that she was VERY put out and snapped and growled at him. In typical Octomom style, she was dramatic and exhibited a lot of attention seeking behavior. I mean, homegirl was FIERCE! Just to be sure that we had the right raccoon, Mike checked to make sure that it was indeed a nursing female. She was one and the same. When he lifted the cage I could see that she weighed about 25-30 pounds. Homegirl was not only fierce, she was full-figured. She was wearing her curves. She was… well, she was HUGE! Once Mike had safely put her on his truck, he set about discovering how Rosie had been getting in and out of the house.

Mike went to each of the three original points of entry that we had sealed the previous week. The third hole on the East side of the house revealed something interesting. Rosie had reopened a hole there that masterfully allowed her to get in and out undetected. The soffit on the house would flex for her to get in and out, but it would snap closed behind her like a trapdoor. Sneaky, sneaky, Rosie! Very sneaky! That’s more like Catherine Zeta-Jones in Entrapment than Catherine Zeta-Jones in Zorro… if you know what I mean.

So, that’s what happened to Rosie. She was a wiley little minx, but she grew on me. Her babies won my heart. Now at night, instead of dreading the noises of the scratching, purring, and chirping, I listen to the silence and I wonder where they are and what they’re doing. I wonder if all eight babies are eating well. I wonder if the thunderstorm on Wednesday night scared them. Are the kits ok being raised by an overweight dramatic mother and no father figure? Is Rosie saving up for their education?

Oh well! It was fun while it lasted, but Rosie has been officially evicted and is no longer a squatter in our home. These photos are all that remains… well, that and the the shredded insulation but that too should soon be remedied.

Thanks so much to Mike from American Animal Control!! You rock! (No, literally. He rocks! He’s a fan of hardcore and he’s a drummer. AND he can pronounce my name, so I, of course, like him.) If you EVER have any animal problems in your home call AAC. They do great work! Mike was professional, knowledgeable, punctual, communicative, and just all around awesome.