April 2006


Last weekend I was doing dishes Saturday morning and I noticed a raccoon amble across our backyard and climb under our back deck. On one side their is about a foot of space open under the deck, but the ground slopes up until ground and deck meet on the other side. I went and peeked under the deck but could only see the outline of the raccoon shuffling around. I wasn’t sure it was living their or just thought it might be a nice place to sleep the day away.

Well apparently it (she) was looking for a nice safe place to raise a family. Today a pest removal guy came and informed us that we have a mamma and a litter of raccoon cubs. They put out a live trap and baited it with, of all things, Hostess Snowballs. Once the catch the mamma, they’ll remove some boards from our deck to get the babies, then relocate the whole family someplace a little more remote. Or at least farther away from us. Hopefully we can get some good pictures of the event.

Mamma Raccoon

Over spring break we all packed into our van and headed down to the wildlife safari. We met my parents there and spent a beautiful sunny morning driving around checking out the wildlife. The animals were pretty much the same ones you would see in a zoo, but it was so much cooler to see them wandering around in the wild — especially when they got close to the car. I’ll post a bunch of pictures in our photo album soon.

Update: Pictures are available at http://www.thewatsons.info/gallery/v/2006_safari.