My already bad raccoon problem, just got worse.  Earlier this week I started hearing odd sounds from my chimney like scuffling, thumps, and the occasional chirping sound.  The chirping almost made me think it was a bird, but it was a more throaty sound than any birds around my house would make, not to mention the thumps and bumps were far larger than a bird. At first I had thought it was a squirrel because anything larger seemed unrealistic considering that we live in just inside of the city, but I was wrong about that one.

To give you a little background for this story, I had just recently purchased a new iPhone 7 (an upgrade from my 5s that I thought was well deserved). Taking precaution, I also bought AppleCare just in case anything happened to it, and good thing too.  Yesterday after having an unsuccessful google session trying to figure out what was in my chimney, I decided the best thing to do was take a peek.  I flipped the flashlight from my phone on, shimmied my way into the fireplace, and held my phone up to the crack in the damper. My light was met by two large, curious eyes; I jumped a little bit but stayed where I was.  He was pretty cute, he had little black ears and tilted his head towards me, seemingly not afraid of me!  Then I did the dumbest thing in the world, I held my phone up closer towards him and  SNATCH!! Just like that he reached down, grabbed my phone out of my hands, and pulled it through the damper!

Just like that, my brand new phone was gone and I was in awe.  It wasn’t until his little face peeked back through the crack that what happened registered and I got angry.  I’m not proud to admit it but I hollered at the raccoon and punched the damper – which did absolutely nothing to help the situation.  Now I’m here a day later using my very old Android and waiting on a trapper I found online to come pull the raccoon out of the chimney and hopefully recover my phone.  This is honestly the craziest thing that has happened to me; all I know is if you have something in your chimney KEEP YOUR IPHONE AWAY FROM IT!!

There are raccoons in my chimney, no doubt about it.  You can hear them every night, running across the roof and then you can hear them crawl down into the chimney and hit the damper.  If you put your head in the fireplace, you can hear them scuffle around, too.  Obviously this situation itself isn’t ideal especially since it’s cold and I would like to use my fireplace without the fear of accidentally cooking a live animal rotisserie style but the other problem is my son.

He turned 10 this year and my wife and I decided that it was time to tell him the truth about Santa Claus.  Two weeks ago after he made a comment about what Santa was bringing him for Christmas, we sat him down and started to explain the truth. With tears in his eyes he started to ask the heart wrenching question, “So Santa isn’t real?”  I’m not kidding when I say right at that moment we heard little footsteps dance across the roof. My sons eyes lit up, first with excitement and then with anger as he pointed his finger at my wife and I and blatantly accused us of lying to him because “Santa’s reindeer were here right now checking to see that he was in bed”, he followed that statement off by storming upstairs so he wouldn’t be caught out of bed past bedtime and would remain on Santa’s good list.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the do-good attitude that the Santa myth instills in him, but I don’t want the truth coming from anyone other than my wife and I.  The problem is that with these raccoons in the chimney he thinks every night Santa’s reindeer drop off an elf that crawls into the chimney to check up on him; so until we get rid of the raccoons, we can’t solve this problem.  We want to have this taken care of before Christmas so that we can finally start a fire and we can move past the Santa idea.

I’ve got quite a unique raccoon problem, and I can’t seem to get rid of it.  You know when your in-laws drop in without letting you know first, that irritation you feel deep in your stomach; well having a raccoon popping in at least once a week is like that x 10.  This has been happening for about a month and a half; it started when my cat moved outside: and so did her food bowl.  It was about a month before I noticed that the raccoon(s) had been raiding the cat food at night, I moved it just inside the dog door so that she could get to it and they couldn’t.  BIG MISTAKE!  Raccoons are smarter than I thought.

After they started getting into the house (which happened for a week max), I put the cat food away completely and only fed my cat during the afternoon when I was watching her.  That didn’t do me much good, however.  After the cat food was gone my raccoon problem only escalated.  The stupid thing(s) discovered the coffee grounds, then the bread, then they figured out how to open the pantry.  Let’s just every morning has uncovered a new disaster.

Since I knew that they were getting in through the dog doors, I asked around the neighborhood for a trap so I could make an attempt to catch at least one.  Unfortunately, I could only find one trap and there were two dog doors.  I should have just closed one and set the trap right on the other, but I didn’t want either of my little dogs (or my cat) to get caught, so I left both open and the trap set on one.  As I’m sure you can guess this didn’t do any good so I’m turning it over to the professionals.  I can’t deal with this raccoon problem on my own, so hopefully the company that I called can.

Having raccoons in the cellar isn’t all fun and games, let me tell you. You know all those cute animal videos you see on Facebook and YouTube where the pet can open the door or get out of their cage, and you laugh and aw respectively because it’s cute? Well I changed my mind, it’s not cute.  Someone’s dog came over and taught the neighborhood raccoons how to do these tricks and it’s costing me!

We’ve had raccoon problems for a while, but never in the house.  It’s usually just an overturned trashcan here and an empty bird feeder there, but never anything severe enough that I wanted to do anything about it.  Until last month, when I started seeing evidence of an animal in my cellar.  It seemed crazy at the time because the only way to get down there was through a cellar door on the side of the house, and animals can’t open those things! Right?  Yeah, I totally believed so I just tidied up the little mess that I found and said that was that, until two days ago. I went on a week-long getaway with my sister-in-law and expected my house to be in tip top shape when I got home, and I was sorely disappointed.

Pulling into my driveway, already slightly perturbed because of a rough flight – I had a three year old sitting behind me and we all know how that goes – and it only got worse from there. Not only were the trashcans I had left on the curb knocked over and all the contents ripped apart and strewn across the yard, but there were two raccoons slinking out of the cellar that I caught red handed.  Furious, I jumped out of my car and chased them away before I stormed into my cellar, flashlight in hand, to find it completely trashed (literally).  The garbage from outside was littering the floor, cans of food were knocked over, jars were broken, and maybe worse of all feces was everywhere! It smelled worse than a county fair porta potty! I was livid. It took me until about an hour ago to get the place cleaned up and smelling presentable.  Now I’m on the phone with a locksmith and a trapper to take care of the door and the raccoons.  That’s the last time I catch any animals in my cellar!

I have a reoccurring raccoon problem, and not one where every couple of days I’m seeing a raccoon in my backyard; don’t get me wrong that’s happening too but this is worse.  I don’t know how and I don’t know why but for the last three years raccoons have been finding ways to break into my attic.  Maybe it’s the same raccoons maybe it isn’t, all I know is we have trapped and removed them countless times.  All in all, I just want this problem to be over with.

The first raccoon wasn’t that big of a deal, I was 26 and had just moved into my first home which (as I’m sure you can imagine) needed some work – okay it needed a lot of work.  The raccoons that were occupying the attic then had been there before I moved in, so I just put it on the to-do list and took care of it as soon as I could.  That was actually the longest I went without a raccoon problem, but the next year it happened again.  This didn’t make any sense to me, we had closed up the entrance that we thought the other raccoons made and yet there were three more raccoons, casually nesting in the insulation.

This became sort of a dance after a while.  I’d find the usual evidence of a break in: holes in the wall, ripped up insulation and plastic, and chewed up wood; scratching, footsteps, chewing, and thumping; and a very familiar odor would waft through the house.  Then I’d call Dave (a trapper in town) and he’d come set up however many traps, leave, come back the next day and take the raccoons that had been caught.  After all the animals were trapped, we would close off the entrance and call it a day.  A few months will go by and then the process repeats itself.  This has happened, in total, six times; I CAN’T AFFORD IT ANYMORE.  No offense to Dave, but I need some serious help.  This is worse than a bad dream you can’t wake up from, it’s a bad dream that you have every night for a week every couple of months and it never seems to stop.  Can someone please just help me with my raccoon problem?

Cleaning up 17 dead chickens was not on my list of things to do today, but guess what? Last night a raccoon killed my chickens, almost all of them too. I’ve got four left and I’m not sure one will make it to tomorrow morning.  Needless to say, I’m ticked. I raised these chickens from chicks and they had just started to lay eggs! They weren’t a year old yet, and here I am, just about back where I started from.

I talked to a couple of my neighbors earlier and I guess they’ve been having similar problems, only it’s not just raccoons, skunks have been out and about too.  Over the last five years I have lost roughly 30+ chickens to a combination of raccoons, weasels, dogs, bird flu, and even cars, but usually it’s a few here and there.  This is the first time that I have had nearly ALL of my chickens massacred and killed at one time and I don’t plan to let it happen again.

A close friend of mine had a problem with raccoons killing his chickens a few years ago, so I asked him for advice.  Since I’m not willing to sit up all night to try and shoot the coon, he recommended trapping it. He gave me the number for a guy that considers it his ‘specialty’.  Well, I’ll let you know how special he and his traps are after they catch thing(s).  All I know is I’m going to deal with my problem my way, and hopefully help my neighbors in the process.

Having raccoons living in your chimney is no walk in the park, especially when you don’t know about it.  I honestly can’t tell you how long they have even lived in there, and yes there are more than one.  A mother and four babies, to be exact.  It might seem crazy to you that I didn’t realize there was something unusual living in my chimney, but my mind has been on other things lately, and since the weather has just started to cool down for the year, I haven’t had much reason to be around the chimney now have I?

So there I was, on a chilly mid-October’s night, and I decided that nothing but a warm fire could make my night more perfect.  I collected the firewood and arranged it carefully in the fireplace, then I opened the damper.  I heard loud scratching as (what I assumed to be) the mother scurried out of the chimney, then two small raccoons rolled out from the open damper, hissing and running frantically for some sort of cover; I was right behind them. Cowering behind my kitchen counter, I watched two more raccoons crawl out of the damper into my house, I couldn’t believe it I had been sharing my house with 5 raccoons for who knows how long!  I probably sat there for a good ten minutes before I could really wrap my head around the fact that there were raccoons living in my chimney.

With my husband overseas in Turkey, there was no way I was going to be dealing with this problem on my own.  After about an hour of research and deliberation (noted I did this at my mother-in-law’s house), I was able to find a company online that specialized in wildlife removal. Luckily, they had a 2 o’clock appointment available that day to come out and find the little suckers.  In the end, it took about an hour and a half to find and capture all four babies but we did it.  I’m still stressed that the mother raccoon will come back and chew her way through my front door to get her babies back, but the trapper assured me that that wasn’t exactly how it worked.  They set a trap near the chimney entrance and hopefully she’ll be trapped and gone in the next couple of days.  It has been a week and the whole thing still seems surreal to me, but here’s my advice: before you go starting a fire, listen carefully for any sounds coming from above the damper.  You never know if you’ll have raccoons living in your chimney, too.