Animals in your house?

• If an animal wandered into your garage - let it out! Animals need to eat and drink every day. Nocturnal animals will leave at night if you leave the garage door open a few inches. Sprinkle white flour across the threshold and check before you go to bed for footprints walking away from the flour, then close the door.
  Place a small piece of meat or pet food on the floor to be sure that it is uneaten the next morning; further confirming that no one is still trapped inside.


• If you hear animal noise in a crawlspace, attic, or under a hot tub or deck in spring and early summer, and the animal is larger than a rodent, it is almost certain to be a mother with babies. Don't panic! They will leave! Mother raccoons don't make a nest like a bird, so must find a place safe from people and dogs for her newborns. Baby raccoons nurse and sleep, making little noise. Once they get mobile, they become playful like puppies or kittens. Evicting mom and babies once they are active will give them a much better chance of survival than evicting when they are newborn. If possible, be patient until the young go out on foraging trips with their mother to evict, or simply close the hole when they have left.


• Only install a one-way door if you are sure the young are leaving at night with their mother, learning to climb trees. Otherwise you will lock the mother out, leaving babies to die. Look for big and little footprints in white flour sprinkled near the exit, or visually confirm that they are going out. Once babies begin to go out on foraging trips with mom at night, they are nearly ready to leave the natal den. Alternately you can close the hole when ALL of them are confirmed to have left to forage an hour or two after dark.