One beautiful June Saturday Pat and I were just finishing up a lazy brunch when I heard a noise coming from our utility room. (Our house is a ranch so our utility room is off of our hall bathroom) After convincing Pat that I wasn't in fact crazy and hearing things, we went to investigate. We opened our utility room door to find....nothing. But we could still hear a faint cooing noise. Initially we thought that there was a birds nest in our chimney flue (the area in which our furnace and other utilities vents through) so we shrugged it off and went on with our weekend. Monday night I was changing out the laundry and I heard it again. But it was louder. And there was a faint scratching noise accompanying it this time. Freaked I grabbed Pat again and we stood there ears pressed to the walls listening. Finally, Pat being the lumberjack handy man that I love said 'F this' and got onto our roof to peer down and investigate. He grabbed a flashlight and a ladder and was off. I stood there helpless waiting for him to come down and tell me it was nothing. I mean, it was right?
Wrong. After shining down the flashlight he saw two little raccoon eyes look up at him. Okay, this could be worse. It's a raccoon and maybe it's hurt and can't get out? So we called animal control expecting them to have some answers. No such luck. An animal control officer came over the next afternoon and Pat met with him to get some answers. From what Pat has told me, this wasn't a helpful conversation. The animal control officer said that at this time of year it was very common for mom raccoons to find chimneys and other safe places to have their babies and raise them until they are old enough to climb out on their own. He also said because it was daytime and the mom was nowhere to be seen that this might be an issue. Apparently, mom raccoons hunt at night for their babies but always come back before sunrise. We live near a pretty busy road so it's not inconceivable for an animal to not make it across the street. Also because of the location and depth of our chimney he laughed at us and said we were shit out of luck and they only way the raccoon was coming out was if it decided to leave. Nice. So he was saying we have an orphan raccoon in our chimney...and I went completely bleeding heart. Laying in bed that night, I couldn't stop talking. "What if it hurt its leg and can't climb out?" "What if it's hungry?" "What if it can't walk yet?" I'm pretty sure my relationship almost ended that night Pat was so annoyed with me. And this is why I love him and he's the one for me - The next day after work we went to Home Depot and bought a small bucket and 100 feet of rope. Figuring out a plan yet? We filled the bucket with water and small crushed up pieces of a chewy granola bar (because I was convinced he was too weak with hunger to move) and lowered it attached to the 100 feet of rope into the chimney. We tied it to a tree near our house creating what we thought was an awesome way from the baby to escape. We grabbed our folding chairs and a glass of wine and sat in our driveway like hicks and watched our chimney. For an hour. Spoiler - nothing happened.
We went to bed completely dejected and didn't know what to do. The next day when we came home from work, the noise in our house was unbelieveable. There was the loudest cooing and scraping noises I had ever heard were coming from the duct work in our utility room. Pat and I just stared at each other without a clue of what to do. Finally Pat said "F this" again and got out tools to take apart our duct work where the sound was the loudest. Convinced that we were about to come face to face with a baby raccoon the next few hours were a little chaotic. They involved a ton of work on Pat's part and a lot of squealing and fretting on mine. When he finally got part of the duct undone, we realized we had to have something to put the raccoon in where it couldn't get out or bite us or anything. So out came an old wine box (boozebags!) that we fashioned into a makeshift pet carrier.
It looked like this:
After wedging out a piece of the duct and spotting a pouf of fur we were ecstatic! We had got it out safe! We took the duct and gently shook it into our makeshift pet carrier. Only when we heard the baby raccoon fall into the carrier, we didn't hear any noise or movement. This is the moment we realized that we had more than one orphan raccoon in our chimney...we had one raccoon in the bottom portion of our duct work, one in the top, and one in the bottom of our chimney.
Pat took baby #1 to a nearby tree a few blocks from our house and left it in a small brush while I cried. We couldn't dwell on this for too long because we had our duct work taken apart and another raccoon to get out that we knew for sure was alive because of all the noise it was making.
