About once every few years we get the novel experience of seeing baby raccoons in our yard, and today was that day. I heard rustling in our rosebushes when I went out for a walk and I thought it was a bird until I saw a little face peeping out at me.
Turns out there were three of the little buggers!
I don't make a habit of harassing baby raccoons, but I accidentally separated this one from its siblings and had to herd it back to them, it was making some of the SADDEST little mewling cries I've ever heard.
Unfortunately Sid tried to help and scared it and it climbed all the way up onto my porch (a long way for something so small) and through the latticework. I told my dad to get me the fireplace gloves because I thought I was gonna have to grab the little bugger, but when my dad came onto the porch it quickly decided it did not want to mess with an even bigger human and climbed headfirst down, got stuck for a second and I almost had to rescue it, but it made it! After that I just kind of followed it till it made it back to where its siblings had gone (into one of our bushes) heard a whole bunch of little chirpy squeaks and saw they were reunited when they popped their heads out on the other side of the bush. At that point I left them alone because I'm ASSUMING their mama left them in our yard and I didn't want to scare them away.
They look super healthy and had perfect reactions to seeing people (run away! Run away!) so that's good! They're awfully cute little buggers, about the size of a 2-3 month old kitten, and not even the smallest babies I've seen. I always have to valiantly resist the urge to try and pet them when I come across them (the little one I separated kept staring at me like "PLEASE don't come closer I don't want to fight you or die 🥺" and I swear it tried to growl at me but it looked so distraught that it was not intimidating at all) but they are wild and I have been scratched and bitten by kittens and it HURTS, I do NOT wanna be scratched and bitten by a baby raccoon. xD They're super duper cute though, and these ones were in really good shape, I'll probably go out tonight and check if they're still in the bush or not, hopefully mama heard the racket the one was making and comes back soon for them.
