Why you might see more raccoons out on July 5th

If you feel like you’ve been seeing raccoons more often in your neighborhood, even out in the daylight, you could be at least part of the cause.

Early summer is when raccoon babies, or kits, are finally mobile enough to move around with their mom. If you disturb their den by doing something like shooting fireworks off nearby, they’ll leave home.

King County biologist Chris Anderson with Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife (DFW) says that up until just a few weeks ago, you weren’t going to see many raccoons out and about. “They stay put with the mother nursing in the nursery den and she makes forays back to that den.”

Now they’re big enough to start venturing out, but they stay close to their mother. Out in more rural areas, you may find raccoons with litters of two or three kits. In urban areas, like Seattle, you will see five or six raccoons in a litter and a different raccoon family about every three-square blocks.

They key in on food sources with their mom, and in Seattle that means trash, which accumulates at many of our summer events. In the KIRO Radio newsroom, we exchanged raccoon-sighting stories from the Fremont neighborhood a few days after the Solstice Festival.

According to Anderson, events like the Solstice Festival are among the reasons raccoons have more than one den.

“All that activity can disturb them at their dens. Right now, if they have young, they are more mobile so they’re going to move from one den to another if they’re disturbed.”

It also means that all of our activity over the 4th of July weekend could cause some of the same raccoon movement that puts them on your porch, your back door, or even in front of your car.

“Be respectful if you know that something is denning or nesting nearby. You, in your suburban or urban area, should choose a different spot to set off fireworks,” says Anderson.

If you live in an area where a lot people are gathering to watch fireworks on the 4th of July, you might see a few raccoons scampering about the morning of the 5th. Keep your distance.

“They are wild animals, they’re not pets,” Anderson says.

The DFW has tips for dealing with raccoons. If a kit gets separated from its mom, don’t try to make a family reunion happen, like in the video below.

As seen in the video shot last week in Seattle’s Eastlake neighborhood, a young raccoon is making crying-type noises after it was separated from its mom. A neighbor, who knew where the raccoons had been nesting, wanted to help reunite the pair and get the kit out of the road. He was eventually able to scoop it up in a bucket and return it to a very angry mom. The do-gooder escaped unscathed, but Anderson says you don’t always get so lucky.

He says mother raccoons come back to look for their lost kits when they deem it’s safe and when humans aren’t around. In some cases, it could take them five or six hours to come back and find the baby. If it’s been five or six hours and the kit is still wandering around outside, that’s when you should call animal control.