A Success Story - Getting Raccoons out of the Attic

Yes something about everything, what if you woke up at about 5am to the sound of thunder but it was no lighting and no rain. It was only a loud crashing and bumping sound that could have been on the roof but something told you this was clearly not the case. It sounded like moving thunder followed by screams and whining, as if a race was taking place across the entire house. It woke everyone in the house but after a minute or two it was apparent this was no thunder this was as I refer to it, critters on the roof or in the crawl space below our roof. We really don't have an attic where you might store things or even convert into useable space. We have a crawl space filled with installation, wires and vents for air and heating the home. Well this time it was much louder than anytime before and while we were pretty sure it was raccoons it was apparent they had taken invading our home to a whole new level.

I immediately turned to the internet for help on the subject of raccoons and other critters that might decide to move into your crawl space. I had to deal with raccoons before last year, when I used a wire cage trap provided by our local police station, I was pretty pleased with myself because I caught two raccoons using peanut butter sandwiches on the roof of our home. We have lots of raccoons in the neighborhood but most of the time the biggest issue in garbage cans being raided at night. When you live near a forest preserve as we do in the suburbs you tend to expect a few critters from time to time we have seen red foxes, possums, rabbits, squirrels and yes raccoons. Well bingo I found an article a professional critter remover had taken the time to develop for just this purpose. http://www.raccoonatticguide.com/

Amazing how some would take the time to do such a thing for people like myself that want a low cost solution to a pretty significant issue. It is one thing to hear them every once and a while and think they are just on the roof, it is another to hear them racing across the entire house, obviously fighting over who gets to live in our crawl space. The article was extremely detailed with a professionally done narrative on every question that might come to mind on the subject. He also included very graphic pictures of raccoons that had set up home in people crawl spaces across the country. Believe me the pictures got my attention and so did his comment that said once they move in, that they just don’t at some point decide “hey lived here long enough think I will move back out” he said that almost never happens!

So I knew without a doubt that action had to be taken and it had to be now! When you consider the noise, damage, possible babies being born in your crawl space and the fear it puts into your small children having an animal just about their head fighting, whining and racing about, it becomes very clear that doing nothing is not an option. As I said the article was well written and even provided local contact information across the United States for hiring professionals to remove them. I decided since the city was no longer providing the cages free of charge to catch them and it was already into the mating season ( Not the time to catch mom and leave the babies to die) that I had to come up with another solution other than catching them myself. I had already called several professional services last year prior to getting the cages from the city and found it to be a very expensive undertaking with most places charging for the equipment, setup and catching of the raccoons on a per raccoon basis. I had heard of a number of things to try but last year I really thought they were only on the roof, not inside of it. So the last thing I was going to do was attempt go up there and catch or run them out, there had to be another way to take care of the problem. I had already tried moth balls and the article said they really didn’t work anyway.

However, there was one solution that caught my eye, that I said hey this might work and if it doesn’t then I will move to the next idea because one way or another, the raccoons had to go! The idea he suggested that he said might work, was noise and lots of it. I said to myself I can do that and with minimum investment of time and effort. My home has a opening to the crawl space in the garage and a hanging shelf right under it for storage that ended up being just what I needed to execute my plan. Yes using my stereo receiver and two Bose speakers I was able to rig up a noise maker that made our home sound like we had surround sound. So here we are about four weeks later and I truly believe we have a solution that works. I made a point the day I set it up to play it for about 4 hrs at high volume and in a small crawl space you can be sure it was pretty loud up there. After that I left it setup so at the sound of any critter I would turn it on to say to them find another home or loss your hearing. In any case I thought I would share this because if hadn’t found the write up on the internet I would have been forced to incur a major expenses to have them removed, one we can ill afford. I still have the speaker up there for now, just to make sure because while we want to be humane we don’t want to share our crawl space in that way. The other nice benefit is that it does sound like we have surround sound when it is on....go figure!