no, you don't start a fire in the hearth. sheesh!
typically, this wouldn't be something i'd be thinking about, but raccoons have been a bit of a theme in the past few months and years... when my son was living nearby, he had a little fella (ok, a big fella) inhabiting his upper eaves. i'd drop by and if it was twilight or later, i'd see his (the raccoon's ) little eyes peering down at me from a hole in the eave, just over the door frame. in the summer of '08, i was at a lovely retreat at a converted church camp in paris, ontario, and happened to see a family of raccoons, a mother and four babies... such cute little fuzzy bums following the mother as they all ambled off up the hill. i'd go out to the same spot for the four days i was there so i could see them walking away from me.
recently one of my colleagues had a raccoon in her house and she was totally grossed out by it.... she had to leave and stay with friends until her landlord got it out of the house.... she could not even be in the same house! clearly, she does not think they are cute and fuzzy.
and then there was my ASL instructor ( i believe i mentioned in an earlier post that i was learning ASL... still at it.... loving it.... but i digress) who had one living in his fireplace. my instructor is profoundly deaf, so the solution he discovered is not without irony (and really, why else would i be writing this post if not for the irony?), and he found it through google (no less!) so it has at least the qualification of others trying it and being successful. he did not want to start a fire either, so here's what he did: he put a boom box/cd -dvd player next to the fireplace and put on music and turned it up as high as it could go .... apparently he had to leave the screeching loud noise going for a time, until the uninvited guests got tired of all that racket and left, but what the heck, he couldn't hear a thing.
supposedly, the tolerance for noise is the downside of this solution. but only if you can hear it.
there ya go!!
you're welcome.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
dear harlequin,
ReplyDeletethis is very helpful information.
thank you.
do you have any advice for dislodging a cocoon from a back molar?
with thanks in advance,
<3
Me thinks the wild life in Detroit has grown accustomed to the overly loud music and mayhem and they are here for the long haul.
ReplyDeletewhat?
ReplyDeleteI wonder if this might work for squirrels in the attic?
ReplyDeleteintellikid is taking ASL next semester - I hope she loves it, too! But that brings me to wonder why you aren't learning CSL? ;-) No, really - there are enough idiomatic idiosyncracies between American and Canadian English, I would think there ought to be a CSL...
Any idea what music was played? Raccoons are such adaptable and tenacious creatures I'm afraid that whatever music would drive them away would also drive me away. I can see us both sitting in the same tree waiting for the noise to end.
ReplyDeletet/--thanks for the visit; tell me more about this cocoon and the back molar.... it sounds like the kind of problem i could get into....my first thought is something that might dissolve it, while saving the molar.... hmmm. now you've got me thinking...
ReplyDeleteWM-- i think you're right about the wild life in detroit.... ALL of it!! thanks for this neat comment
Picses.. perfect comment! ha!
Intelliwench-- our instructor is canadian and has transposed the regionalisms into our instruction.... it seems that " ASL" is not as "A" as it appears.... lots of regional varieties. thanks for the visit.
Mr.C-- well, now i'll have to find out what the music was.... i take your point, though... anything that can drive away such a resourceful creature would likely drive out other resourceful creatures.... i'm getting a nice visual of you in a tree with the raccoon. :)
Raccoons in the chimney...I don't think of them as cute and fuzzy. I respect raccoons for a superior native intelligence and a hand eye coordination that overlaps with primates. They have their own agenda of course but are omnivores that rival ourselves, and so they tend to adapt to the conditions we place on our cities and towns. Only coyotes do better and opossums where epidemic doesn't destroy them. Depending on your attitude it is fortunate or unfortunate that disease also took the raccoons in my area. There are not many left, but squirrels abound. They too are clever opinionated critters.
ReplyDeleteI object to opossums, who succeed through prolific progeny, not through native intelligence. That offends me. They are too dumb to really merit survival and they wouldn't if they weren't so able to reproduce quickly. The problem for me is opossums mimic smarter creatures and so they feel duplicitous to me, or more like they are unfinished half baked creatures-as evidenced by their unfinished snaggly dentition, more like broken rocks than actual teeth and their giant rat tails, half formed in them and finished in a more acceptable way in rodents.
I fear for our position at the top of the food chain sometimes :D
Christopher-- i like your descriptions of our fellow food chain inhabitants.... the opossum rendering was well done! in my area of the country, we have the badger.... which is also a bit of a vicious and tactical creature... apparently, if a badger can't eat it or fu*# it, he pees on it, so no other creature can get any enjoyment of it either ...
ReplyDeleteall things considered, i wouldn't want to be on the bottom of the food chain!
thanks for the visit and your nicely quirky comments.