Tag Archives: raccoons

We All Scream For Ice Cream

27 May

A week or so back I found a freezer-burned carton of ice cream on the bottom shelf – Pumpkin Pie flavor, if that gives you any idea how old the stuff was.

I took it out back and left it beside the dish we use to feed the foxes. The carton was gone the next day;  not surprising, as they will frequently carry off plastic carry-out trays or the like to eat at their leisure. Today I had a bunch of stale bread to toss out to the critters – deer will eat bread, as do the birds and squirrels – and as I was coming back I noticed a flash of orange in one of the trees.

Apparently the raccoons had taken the carton away and climbed the tree to eat the ice cream in peace and quiet. The tree is about thirty feet from the dish so I wasn’t likely to see it there, and it was also on the back side of the tree. The carton was in the mulberry tree on the far right of the photo, about four feet off the ground. (We feed the foxes in an old angel food pan, dropped over a stake pounded into the ground. Food dishes are among the things they have carted off, and we got tired of searching for their dish.)

Can’t blame them.  I feel the same way about ice cream. Keep your paws off!

DSCN0674 (2)

Tags: , , , ,

Moving Day

11 Jun

In an effort to keep the raccoons from eating the bird seed, and the male fox from eating the squirrels, we have begun feeding both sets of critters out by the woods, instead of feeding the ring-tailed beasts on the carport and the “red coats” in the back forty.  In addition to filling the birdfeeders, we still put peanuts and seed in a 5 foot length of PVC pipe outside the den window so the squirrels can get them and the blue jays can’t.

This morning when I went out to feed the “house pets” the pipe was missing.

I looked in the front yard, and The Squire walked along the stream to see if the raccoon had dragged it up the hill. Nada. The pipe is far too narrow for the raccoons to get into, so whatever went on last night must have been very interesting.

A shame we missed the show.

Tags: , , ,

Persistence, Thy Name is Procyon Lotor

2 Apr

??????????There is no system on earth that a raccoon will not  try to outwit. We bought this suet feeder about a week ago, not so much because it is squirrel proof, but to keep the bloody grackles and starlings from eating everything in sight.

To fill it, you unscrew the knob on top, drop two suet cakes into the “pockets” and then hang it from a convenient place.

The first night it was up, the local gang of raccoons managed to unhook it from the post, nearly pulling said post out of the ground in the process, and then rolled it across the lawn and into the stream, where they abandoned it. They did manage to reach in and dig out most of one suet cake.  Mind you, there was a dish with three cups of dry food already on the patio for easy access.

Last night I left my car window rolled down about half-way – and this mess is entirely my own fault – and the raccoons managed to squeeze through the narrow opening and play havoc with two bags of peanuts I left on the back seat.  Bless him, The Squire took on the job of vacuuming out the mess, and retrieving my personal belongings from the peanut shells.

He put all the peanuts and shells that looked worth keeping in a plastic sack and put it on the patio behind him while he finished running the vacuum. Instead of grabbing peanuts out of the top of the open bag, the brazen squirrels came up behind him and chewed a hole in the bottom of the bag – which he discovered when he picked it up to move it.

Ain’t country linving grand?

Tags: , , , , ,