Many hands make short work..or something like that

 

 

The noise woke me at around 3am, two nights in a row. It sounded like someone was rolling a large garbage bin down a driveway – except we were at the cottage and we didn’t have a garbage bin. Or a driveway. On the third night I sat straight up in bed, straining to make sense of the weird noise. I have heard squirrels doing construction on a maternity ward in my attic (sounds like tiny hammers and saws), as well as woodpeckers, foxes, loons and raccoons, chattering at each other pre-dawn. This was a new sound though. I talked it over with the Farmer at breakfast.

I struggled to describe the noise I had heard.

“I heard it too! Thought it was thunder at first. Are the raccoons in the recycling again?”

Our Golden Retriever Fergus had also heard the noise. He was up before dawn, pacing, growling and ready to bolt as soon as someone opened the door. Once outside, nose to the ground, he circled the house three times before he gave up, distracted by an enticingly chewable stick.

“No idea. The recycling was untouched. The porch fridge had little muddy handprints on it – a sign that the raccoons had been trying to get into it – but no other evidence of tampering.

Since our new neighbour began removing trees from his property in order to renovate his cottage, we had all kinds of new wildlife visiting our place. Fergus had an unfortunate meeting with a baby porcupine that resulted in a trip to the vet to get six quills removed from his muzzle. When we set live traps to catch the porcupine family (which is a near impossible feat), we caught a mama and teenaged raccoon instead. They are strong enough to bend metal, so we didn’t leave them in there long. I threw a blanket over the cages to stop the coons from snarling and the Farmer sprung the doors with a long pole. Raccoons can be vicious when cornered.

We didn’t relocate the racoons because there were three babies sniffing around the cages and scurrying up the nearest tree. So now we are host to the whole family. They were sitting in the middle of the road the other night when we came home from dinner, playing tug of war with an earthworm. I hope they don’t get hit by a car. People don’t often realize the lasting effects of cutting down an entire acre of mature trees in one go. It doesn’t give the animals long enough to reorient themselves. They wander around dazed and confused for a bit until they find another suitable home.

I thought about this as I approached my compost bin with a load of corn husks. The sliding door on the top of the bin had been pulled open and bent in half. Muddy handprints covered the side of the barrel where tiny hands had worked hard to roll and spring it open. I’m going to have good soil this fall thanks to those raccoons who keep stirring up my compost.