How to Evict Your Raccoon Roommates | National Geographic

The main conflict between people and raccoons is when raccoons use human resources to meet their own needs and ends. Raccoons are the quintessential generalist; they really can live in a whole variety of habitats. In Washington, DC, they see urban areas as opportunities, as rich in resources for them, and they kind of move in.

So, they move into buildings when there are structural defects that they can exploit. They will den in chimneys, they'll den in attics, they'll give birth to babies there. People either try to solve the problem themselves, usually with horrible consequences, or they hire a professional company who comes out and traps and removes the animals.

Because we've had rabies move through this area, the governmental folks will not allow raccoons to be moved and relocated, so those animals have to be euthanized. A long time ago, we decided we need an alternative model to the trap and kill, and it focuses on eviction, exclusion, removal, and reunion, leaving these animals in their known territorial home range areas so that they still have access to all the resources they need to survive.

In that procedure, we usually chase the adults out of the house and then put up a screen to keep them from regaining entry, and that's it; the job's done. They go on their way.

Now, with babies, we remove them, put them in a specially constructed box, which is called a reunion box, and then mom, whom we have chased out, she'll come along that night or sometimes even sooner, find her babies, and move them.

We've seen, with putting the reunion boxes back up on roofs, kind of two types of mothers: the frantic ones who come back and don't know how to get in the box and just go absolutely crazy and berserk, and then the calm ones who come back and look at the box and kind of figure out where the entrance is, go in, get their babies, and move them very calmly with, we think, the idea already in their head that, "I know where I'm going. I'm going to take my babies, and I'm going to put them in this other den that I feel is secure."

Through the work that we did with National Geographic, we had access to a very high-tech camera that was able to record sequences and tell us more about how these animals met these challenges that we confronted them with and what we needed to do to make things better and more humane for them out there.