It's a battle over turf (literally) here at Alpine Avenue. Every night these pesky raccoons tear up our lawn and every morning Brent picks up the clumps and pats them back into place. In the 15 years we've lived here we've never had raccoon issues. Yet, suddenly it's a nightly recurrence. Who knew raccoons like to rummage lawns for grubs (probably Japanese beetles).
I asked Urbano, our delightful pest control expert, what to do and he suggested I shoot the culprit!
As if! First, I have no gun. Why? Because even if I owned a gun, I wouldn't dare to use it. Besides, if I shot the raccoon, then what? Who wants to deal with that mess? There is probably a reason I'm a city dweller!
So Urbano and Brent have both doused the lawn with insecticides; grub-be-gone type products. If these don't eliminate the problem we'll have to bring in the Jim Bridger trapper dudes. Although this approach has at least one potential liability. What if one of the neighbor's cats end up in the trap? I'm not a fan of our frequent-visitor-cats, but still, I suppose I should be tolerant of our neighbor's beastly pets!
Now, if only our raccoon pests were as cute as RJ Raccoon from Over the Hedge. Apparently, RJ likes cookies. Now there is a smart raccoon! These lame real racoons digging for grubs when they could be looking for cookies in trash cans!
One funny piece of advice I read in my getting-rid-of-raccoon-research told the homeowner that they don't need to completely eliminate all grubs from their lawn, they simply need to have less lawn grubs than their neighbors so the raccoons go next door for their food source. This counsel reminds me of the logic that to avoid being mauled by a grizzly bear you don't need to outrun the bear, you just need to be a faster runner than your companion!
Hopefully we will solve this raccoon debacle before our lawn is destroyed. Brent has declared war!
