Baby Raccoons Removed From Inside a Wall

Access, mostly. An attic can be entered, inspected and worked in; a wall cavity cannot. The young are somewhere inside a closed void, usually located by sound and by knowing where a female would choose, and getting them out is careful work. It is also time-critical in a way an empty attic is not — leaving non-mobile kits in a wall is not an option, and neither is waiting to see what happens.

The worst outcome available. The kits are too young to leave on their own, so removing or excluding the female leaves them to die inside the wall — which is inhumane, and which leaves the homeowner with decomposition and a serious fly problem inside a cavity that has to be opened up to resolve. This is the single most common and most costly mistake made on spring raccoon calls, and it is usually made with good intentions by someone who did not know the litter was there.

Time of year and sound. Raccoons in Wisconsin have kits in spring, so a raccoon that has taken up residence between roughly March and June should be assumed to have young until proven otherwise. Kits make a distinctive chittering and crying rather than the heavy movement of an adult, and it usually comes from a fixed spot rather than moving around. Any inspection worth paying for establishes whether a litter is present before anything else is decided.

Raccoons are strong, dexterous, and very capable of making an opening rather than finding one. Common routes are a soffit or fascia they have pulled apart, a roof edge or vent they have worked open, a chimney, and gaps where a roofline meets an addition. A female looking for a den site in early spring is highly motivated and will make the entry bigger if it is nearly right, which is why raccoon damage often looks like vandalism.

The building has to be closed properly, and the site cleaned. Raccoons leave heavy contamination and strong residual scent that draws the next animal to the same spot, and the entry point they made is usually structural damage rather than a gap — torn soffit, damaged fascia, opened roof edge. Repair and exclusion is most of the real work on a raccoon job; removing the animals is the part that gets the attention.