So here's the story behind my raccoon baby photos...

This past winter the garage shop collapsed from snow-weight. We've been unable to have a chance until this week to start demolishing the building so we can start to rebuild...

the past couple weeks our dog has been going crazy and whining over something in the shop.. we couldn't find anything until we started looking around and heard some noises coming from the paper blow in insulation that was insulating the tin roof (which some was still intact). I thought they were birds until my fiance got a better look and realized it was a raccoon raising babies..

the last thing we need is to get in the middle of a mama coon and her little ones... we had to tare the shop down and the only way to do that was to get rid of them... we weren't going to kill them, just hopefully scare mama off so she would move the family elsewhere..

So my fiance ended up slowly taring down the insulation and in the process one kit fell.. well what happened was the mother noticed that we now knew her once "safe" hiding spot and moved the babies.. after a few minutes, we got out of the way and the mama came and took her baby somewhere else in the shop (in a woodpile we found out later). Then we were tearing down more plastic and found the other three kits which you can see in the pictures that I am adding up..

At this point, mama disappeared and we had no idea where she was. We decided to check to see if the babies were still alive and they were so we put them in a shoebox and put them outside the shop... this was Wednesday night.

Thursday morning I look and find that they are still in the shoebox so I left them during the day to see if mama would take them.. no such luck.. so we left them out one more night in the shoebox to see what would happen... Friday morning comes along and the three babies are still there...

At this time they are really noisy and I knew they were getting hungry since they were so little... they didn't have the eyes open yet and their ears were just starting to pull away from their heads...The little female started to just open her eyes that day.. It was very cute.. So I went to Wal-Mart (after doing a lot of research) and bought some kitten milk formula. I also found out that the mother would take the orphans back even if human scent was present on the kits. So I called up my mom and we fed each kit with a eye dropper... it was awesome..

Then, I went down to my dad's and got the large have-a-heart trap. We put the three babies in the trap to entice her to get into the trap... we knew that she was no longer in the shop but would be looking for the little ones in the shop. So after setting them in on Friday night, on Sat morning only the little girl was left of the three.. I'm sure the mother would have been back for her little daughter, but the neighbors dogs kept barking first thing and I think they might have spooked her...

Saturday morning was busy for my fiance so I ended up bring her to work with me so I could feed her when she was hungry and make sure she was alright. I already determined that the mother wouldn't come until dusk or early morning (since coons aren't actually nocturnal) so when I got home I got a few more pictures of her and I together and sadly put her in the have-a-heart trap as dusk approached... it was hard.. I kinda got attached to her but I knew she would be better off with being with mom..

So this morning I checked the trap and she was gone... mama had come and got her.. thank god..

So yea.. it was quite an experience and I'm glad I could share it...

Blessed be
~*jen