June 2011 Raccoon Babies…
Lindsey called me one day in the spring of 2011 and said “there’s a big animal screaming in the attic” - it’s hurt, and we have to save it. Well, we crawled up there - it was hotter than blazes and we found a little baby raccoon nearly dead of exhaustion almost passed out in the main part of the attic. She put it in a cage, and carried it downstairs and went to the pet store and got some pet milk and fed it through a syringe. (I could see this going bad quickly…, but Lindsey refuses to give up on any living thing) Then later that day Lindsey says, “there’s more - I heard them” - back to the attic we go. But we can’t get to them, because they are apparently in the wall behind one of the closets. The one we got first had apparently crawled out of the wall.. We get a pole with a basket on the end - we try everything - they are way down in the wall!
Pretty soon Kathy gets home and says we’ve got to get it out of the wall, or call somebody that can. I say " the only way to get it is to cut a hole in the wall". Guess what we did? Two holes, to be exact. So, we get to them, no momma raccoon to be found, but three more babies, that were all very close to dead.
Over the course of the next week, Lindsey nursed every one of them back to health. She fed them every few hours with a syringe and kept them in a box. I swore the weakest of them wouldn’t live more than a few hours, but she kept them alive and well. After just a few days they were the hit of the neighborhood kids, who would come over and play with them while Lindsey was feeding them. They also got really noisy and rambunctious. After they ate they all would lay on top of each other in a pile.
I told her they weren’t staying with us, so Lindsey called all around to find somewhere to take them. Finally one of the neighbors found a shelter in Chicago and volunteered to take them up there. It was a good experience for Lindsey - she did a good job with them, but I think she was ready for them to leave - it was a lot of messy work. By the time she gave them up, they had all learned to walk - run really, and to drink milk from a pan.
