Factors That May Affect The Time Frame For Raccoon Removal
Raccoons in the backyard at night can be easy to remove, and most times, scaring raccoons away from your house is possible. However, these animals can also occupy spaces like your chimney, attic, basement, roof, and inside your walls. If this happens, removing them becomes trickier for professionals and, in turn, impacts the cost and duration of removal.
Below are factors that can affect the timeframe for raccoon removal:
Most times, the location of your property is the source of an infestation. And this has a significant impact on the number of raccoons that will infest your property.
For instance, if you live in an area that supports nature, such as one with trees and plants that provide food and shelter for these creatures, it will be more likely for them to infest your home for warmth and proximity to their food supply, making raccoon removal more difficult.
Raccoons are excellent tree climbers, and if you have trees extending to your roof, it will give them easy access to your house. They also choose to stay in dark places around the house, which may make it difficult to capture them and cause delays during removal.
Before a wildlife professional can remove raccoons from your property, they will conduct an inspection. This inspection is to determine where the animals are camped on your property and if they have any babies. The higher the raccoon infestation on your property, the longer it may take to complete a thorough inspection.
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How Long the Raccoon(s) Have Spent on Your Property
The longer these critters stay on your property, the more difficult it will be to get them out. This is because they would be accustomed to the surroundings, and there could be many raccoon homes within and around your property.
A prolonged raccoon infestation makes removal more difficult. Raccoons are intelligent, and they would likely have multiple escape routes to avoid danger and removal. They would also have caused extensive damage to the interior of your home. Besides increasing the raccoon removal cost, it would also take longer to repair.
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The Number Of Raccoons On Your Property
The more raccoons you have on your property, the longer it will take to get rid of them. One trap would suffice for a single raccoon. However, if there is more than one raccoon on your property, you’ll need more traps and return trips to remove all, which takes time.
There’s a chance they won’t catch all the raccoons on your property at once. That would require having the raccoon removal professional come in and reset the traps, which would lengthen the time it takes to get rid of the raccoons permanently.
Also, traps can be expensive, costing about $250-$350 per trap, and you’ll need one for every raccoon. If you have many raccoons on these sites on your property and cannot match their number with the required number of traps, it may take longer to get them off your property.
Removing a live raccoon is simple and involves baiting the animals with foods they enjoy. Even if the animals are camped in an area where traps are impossible to use, they can still be removed within a specified time frame. Removing a dead raccoon, on the other hand, can take a long time.
Discovering a dead raccoon is a difficult task. It becomes even more complicated when the raccoon is in a place that isn’t easily accessible to wildlife professionals, such as within your walls or in the chimney.
Removing a raccoon with babies will prove trickier than a regular raccoon removal. It gets even more complicated and risky if the female raccoon has its den in your attic.
A trap or one-way door won’t be enough to remove a raccoon with its babies humanely. That is because a trap or one-way door will only help remove the female raccoon, except if the baby raccoons are grown enough to leave the den by themselves.
In cases where the kits are still young, the baby raccoons can be retrieved from the den by the removal professionals. Then the female raccoon is lured out or locked out of the den when she goes to look for her pups and food.
In some cases, juvenile raccoons may be inside the wall. If this happens, it takes even longer to complete raccoon removal.
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Repairs and Modifications After Raccoon Removal
You might need repairs for damages caused by these raccoons after professionals have removed them in the gentlest manner possible. This will affect the raccoon removal time frame.
Raccoons in the basement, for example, dig holes for easy entry and escape. These holes become larger over time, weakening your home’s foundation. It takes time and money to repair and seal these holes so that raccoons can’t reopen them. This also applies to attic repairs, where raccoons may have harmed your home insulation.
Other sections of your house, such as the roof, chimney, walls, and soffit, might be more challenging to repair and take longer to restore to a good shape.
An effective professional raccoon removal process isn’t complete without installing preventive modifications to your property. Depending on the changes made to your property, installing these modifications adds additional time to the raccoon removal service timeframe.
These changes may include, using spikes on climbable surfaces, installing a raccoon screen at the top of your chimney, raccoon guards for your trees and bird feeders, and a fence around your yard to prevent future entrance. It may also include installing motion-activated sprinklers, ultrasonic speakers, and raccoon lights to scare them away.
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Using The Wrong Removal Service
It will take longer to remove a raccoon from your property if you try to do it yourself. There’s a chance that you’ll suffer injuries that could discourage you for a while, giving these animals further time to build a resistance. Hence, the importance of leaving the job to wildlife professionals.
It is crucial that you don’t use the services of just any wildlife professional. If you opt for one without raccoon experience, you might be setting yourself up for a longer raccoon removal time.
Raccoon removal requires the services of someone with sufficient knowledge about them. Employing someone with experience and knowledge about these animals could be the difference between trapping and removing the raccoons in under an hour and battling with them for a week.
