Been seeing one around the chicken coop and stirring them at night. I shooed him away but.. Well, I live trapped the sucker and took it for a ride! I have another property that I take 'um to and set 'm free.. A trip down my driveway..
Yeah, I have taken a few of them for a ride too. I know someone who has a resort down by the river who I don't like very much, so I drop them off at his place.
HaHa.. Gotta love it.. I betcha I've dumped 50 over there at my other property. There's a house about 1/4 mi. away. Dunno if they venture up there or not..
My biggest problems with the coons, although they are adorable creatures, is that they eat too much of the squirrel and bird food, and then dump out what they don't eat, and they make a mess out of the compost pile, tearing open my compost boxes. I wouldn't want my cats around a raccoon, but they only come around at night when the cats are in, although Ella gets pretty upset seeing the raccoon at the squirrel food bowl. The squirrels cause more of a problem in the garden, moving bulbs from one place to another, and digging up plants so that they can bury peanuts in the hole.
Although Maine supposedly has snakes, I have only seen one in the eighteen years that I've been here, and I have spent quite a lot of time outdoors, including a hundred acres of woods and fields. I also believe that we have ticks; otherwise, the state is wasting a lot of money on Lyme Disease warnings, but I have never seen a tick since I have been here. There are roaches, I hear, in the cities, but I haven't seen one of them, either. We had a lot of ticks in Michigan, but no one worried about them when I was living there, and I surely saw enough roaches in Texas, but none of either in Maine. Fleas we have here, but my cats haven't brought any home since I've been feeding them right.
During our 13 years in Missouri Ozarks in the middle of Mark Twain Nat'l Forest, we had an abundance of wildlife, too. More often ground-hogs (gosh, I had not known how BIG they are, giant rats!), and opossums, which have the most terrifying-looking teeth I've ever seen. The occasional racoon seen was pretty much not a problem, except the one I spotted in broad daylight, slowing working it's way around the front fence, completely oblivious to my presence, not even 6 feet away. Sure it was rabid, all the outward signs, I dispatched it with the 9mm I always carried for Copperhead protection. Like this one: Almost dark, got back from our evening walk to the deserted one-room schoolhouse east end of our property, 1/2 mile there and back, wife heard rustling in foliage by our front fence, as we approached the gate. I did not hear it, snake slithered into view mere feet away from us! Timing is everything. A few seconds later, an ankle-bite would have been a possibility. I fired the 9mm when the snake was motionless, from about ten feet away, hard target, shot hit the snake behind it's head, snake was quite perturbed. Still squirming a bit, I closed to about four feet, the head area an easy hit. I am partial to Smith & Wesson stainless steel old versions, mine a 6906, compact version: In reality, mine is a "pre-6906", a 669, which I retrofitted with 6906 grips and a spur hammer from a 645, disliking the spurless hammer design of the 669 & 6906, which cannot be thumb-cocked except from first-notch position, and even then difficult. Frank
When my cousin and I were in Jr. High, we found a couple of baby coons and kept them. Mother wasn't either killed or ? Anyway, I left mine at his house. They were fun to play with, but did get big and a Fish & Game Warden told us that we had to hand them over to him. "Bye, bye". We really liked them.