Eileen Goldfinger said a raccoon has been swimming in her pond. She can tell because when he enters the water, he usually kicks over a couple of her potted plants.
“I think he wants the fish,” she says.
Her husband, Paul, put down traps and secured the lids on the garbage pails, as the raccoons seem to have quite a varied diet.
Eileen said when she lived in Chester, her neighbor had a gopher in her yard that would dig into the ground and chew the roots of her plants, killing some of them. Being a nature lover, she didn’t want to kill the gopher. She just preferred it to eat someone else’s plants. She bought a Have-a-Heart animal trap, set it, and much to her surprise, the trap worked. The baby gopher walked into the trap and was caught. She now had to take the caged animal and set it free. But where? Surely, not in a neighbor’s yard. So she and Eileen put the cage in her car and drove around Chester looking for a wooded area in which they could open the trap and set the animal free. But there were no woods to be found. Every lot had a house on it. And so they drove into town and found a little patch of public space and set the trap down and opened the cage. They had to coax the animal out with a couple of sticks because it seemed to have grown accustomed to its new digs. Or perhaps it found the public space in the middle of Chester inhospitable, compared to a wooded backyard filed with plants. But they finally got the gopher out of the cage and the two women drove off, feeling they had just taken a brief excursion out into the wild.
“I think he wants the fish,” she says.
Her husband, Paul, put down traps and secured the lids on the garbage pails, as the raccoons seem to have quite a varied diet.
Eileen said when she lived in Chester, her neighbor had a gopher in her yard that would dig into the ground and chew the roots of her plants, killing some of them. Being a nature lover, she didn’t want to kill the gopher. She just preferred it to eat someone else’s plants. She bought a Have-a-Heart animal trap, set it, and much to her surprise, the trap worked. The baby gopher walked into the trap and was caught. She now had to take the caged animal and set it free. But where? Surely, not in a neighbor’s yard. So she and Eileen put the cage in her car and drove around Chester looking for a wooded area in which they could open the trap and set the animal free. But there were no woods to be found. Every lot had a house on it. And so they drove into town and found a little patch of public space and set the trap down and opened the cage. They had to coax the animal out with a couple of sticks because it seemed to have grown accustomed to its new digs. Or perhaps it found the public space in the middle of Chester inhospitable, compared to a wooded backyard filed with plants. But they finally got the gopher out of the cage and the two women drove off, feeling they had just taken a brief excursion out into the wild.
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