Chimneys are often the hardest hit areas, so make sure you keep your eye on things up there, and you should also consider giving the roof a once-over to ensure it’s as protected from wild animals as you hope it would be. They will break anything apart to get into your home, once they learn it offers them everything they’re looking for. These masked creatures are very well known for the serious amount of damage they can cause wherever they go, and if you have a raccoon living in your home or on your land, it won’t be long before you start to see signs of this. These can affect you and your pets, as well as other animals. There are plenty of diseases present in the droppings of wild animals, and with raccoons, roundworm eggs are a real concern. Warning: Please be very careful when dealing with raccoon scat. Cats are well known to refuse to use their litter tray or eat if the two are too close to each other. This is actually quite different to other animals. A drain cover right next to a food-filled dumpster is a great spot. Believe it or not, both foxes and raccoons are known to create latrines very close to food sources. Raccoon scat often contains remnants of whatever they’ve eaten, so you might find berries and other food stuffs that have passed undigested. In fact, different animals leaving their droppings in the same latrine is thought of as a way of marking territory. This can make it slightly more difficult to identify the animal that is causing you problems, unless it is possible that they both are. If you spot different faces in the same latrine, it could very well be that a fox and a raccoon, or a number of them, are using the same latrine. It is also easier to clean it all up.Īt the same time, however, raccoons aren’t the only animals who are known to use these latrines out in the wild. If the scat is all in the same place, the disease threats aren’t scattered around. This will be a toilet-space, of sorts, that many raccoons can use. Now, in some respects, identifying the droppings left by raccoons, otherwise known as scat, can be made much easier by the fact that they use latrine-style areas. These hind paw prints are likely to be more splayed-out than the front ones are. The hind paw prints of the raccoon are considerably larger, but range between 3.5 cm to 10.5 cm in length, and 3.5 cm to 7.5 cm in width. The fur of the raccoon often disguises these. You may or may not see claws in the prints. The front paw prints of the raccoon can be 3.5 cm to 8 cm wide, and 3.5 cm to 7.5 cm long. This means that the back prints are often more visible than the front prints, and this is because those back feet take the brunt of the animal's weight. The paw prints themselves will be larger at the back than they are in the front, and they’ll be pushed down more heavily in the mud at the back too.

Those muddy paw prints will show where the animals have visited, and if the animal is managing to get inside your home, you can use the tracks to show you some or all of the way. They leave paw print indentations in the soft mud, soil and dirt around the water, and they also walk their paw prints around too.

They generally spend their time in areas close to sources of water, and this makes life easier for you when it comes to identifying them. If you have a source of water in your yard, or you have water close to your home, you are likely to see a lot of raccoon tracks. They are easily lured out of their comfortable nesting spots with something tasty they can eat. They are generally nocturnal animals, although it is not uncommon to see them out and about during the day. Raccoons leave a wealth of evidence in their wake, and as well as plenty of noise and mess, there will also be a host of other signs that prove they have been living in your home or on your land. Need raccoon removal in your hometown? We service over 500 USA locations! Click here to hire us in your town and check prices - updated for year 2020.

Racoon paw prints