Let The Battle Begin

In our family, we like animals - all kinds really. I grew up with horses, a pony, geese, dogs, cats, parrots, we had an escape artist of a hamster once, but apparently he died of "old age" when I was visiting my father, but that's a whole other story. Sam and I, however, are a lot less daring than my mother and we are pretty much cat people when it comes to the animal kingdom coming in doors. We will feed just about anything that comes to our door, but for most animals, that is as far as it goes. We love feeding the birds, squirrels and chipmunks. In fact, our squirrels are so well fed that when they were jumping onto the bird feeders they were pulling them down - or so we thought.

We know there are other critters out there like skunks and raccoons - we know this because we have had encounters with both. I had a run in with a skunk one day in the backyard. The kids and I ran like wind into the house and hid and Spencer had bad skunk dreams for a month after. One afternoon I head something outside, I looked out to find Sam running out of the garage, as he said, "squealing like a little girl". He took a raccoon by surprise (we had left the door open), but it turned out he was the one surprised.

The other morning Sam woke up at 4:30 AM to do some reading in preparation for a meeting he had that day. As he was reading, he was startled to catch something out of the corner of his eye moving about the deck. He looked up to see something looming out of the window - it was a raccoon climbing the pole of the bird feeder (sorry squirrels for the false accusations). When he didn't find anything interesting, he moved on to the garbage can we use to store the bird and squirrel food.

Now, in theory, raccoons are really cool animals and for a brief moment we thought of setting out food for him, but he quickly became unwelcome when he pooped on the railing of the deck, right next to the corn we feed the squirrels. As the Owen would say, "sisgusting"! These guys have got to go - little kids and wild animal poop do not mix. So, let the battle begin. Sam vs. the raccoon. So far, it's not looking good at 0 - 2 and, I'm not sure, but I think he is gloating.