Where's Davy Crockett When You Need Him?

The picture below is our crawl space -- it's propped open in the picture, but even when it's closed, it isn't exactly air-tight. So, over the years, it's been a haven for various animals -- in fact, you could consider it some type of stray animal birthing center.

We don't have pets (see previous postings for our very short-lived pet experience) but, of course, we're happy to give them a nice place to have their babies. It's the least we can do. A couple years ago, Jen's brother went underneath the house to fix one of our pipes and noticed a skunk pacing back and forth -- since the skunk was pretty good about not spraying, we allowed it to hang out under the house. Besides, I'm told skunks keep the rats and mice away. So, if it doesn't smell up the place, we figured we might as well let it be.

After this week, the Burr Animal Birthing Center is now closed (another victim of a bad economy?). The latest (and final) patron was a raccoon. Over the past couple weeks, we've heard scratching noises under the house. While they've been annoying and a bit frightening, we let them be until two nights ago when there was a raccoon fight in our carport. After the fight, our mother raccoon went under the house and started whimpering (it was worse than that, but that's the best way I can describe it). Jen couldn't get back to sleep, so we decided we'd better do something about it. Below is a picture of momma raccoon herself, safe in the trap.

But that's only a small part of the story. We called "Animal Gidders" - as in "we gid 'em for ya" and along came Bill, with Jose and friend (never got his name since he was on his cell phone half the time). Before leaving for manicures, Jen and Calissa both whispered -- "that guy scares me", speaking of Bill. While I tend to agree with their assessment, Bill is good at his job for that very reason. He went on to describe how you "just gotta show the coons who's the boss!" He sent Jose under the house to do the dirty work and then built a "tunnel" out of our boys' old dresser that created a funnel from the crawl space to the trap. After finishing the tunnel, he told Jose to "go for it!" Jose proceeded to use Conner's T-ball bat and make as much noise as he could to try to get the raccoon to go through the tunnel. After about 20 minutes, Bill said he was going to go in and "show Jose how it's really done." Bill gave me a demonstration of what he does...uh, let's just say if I were a raccoon, I'd be pretty happy about being in the trap and away from Bill as quickly as possible. Bill was convinced there were baby raccoons as well since they "don't go under the house just for fun". Sure enough, here's Bill with 4 baby raccoons that were together in a pile.

He asked if I had kids at home, so I told Parker and Conner to come out (after Bill's "demonstration" I was going to do anything he said). Here's Parker and Conner holding a couple babies -- I'll be honest, I'm not an animal guy, but it just goes to show you that anything small can be pretty cute. Just to drive the small = cute point home, Calissa ended up getting her toes painted for free after her manicure just because the lady "had" to do it since her little toes are so cute!

After extracting (evicting?) all of the coons, Bill also sealed up the crawl space so nothing can get back in there. Burr Animal Birthing Center -- now closed for the foreseeable future. Now, Jen can once again sleep peacefully and you can't put a price on that ... or, if you can, it's at least worth more than the $400 that Bill charged us for his efforts.