UBOs

I was just coming downstairs after taking an afternoon shower (I had gone for a run with a friend) when Mr. Crackers said, "Oh good you're done. I need you to walk around to the side of the house and look at something with me." While he didn't seem overly worried, I nonetheless had a deep sense of foreboding. I was fully expecting him to point out something like rotten pieces of siding on the house or something else equally expensive and time consuming to repair.

What I was not expecting was for him to point to one of the basement window wells and say, "Look down in there & tell me what you see." As I approached the area he was pointing to, I thought I would see some kind of small reptile like a frog or a turtle. But instead, what I saw was a UBO - an unidentified brown object. Well to be absolutely correct what I saw was a pile of unidentified brown objects.


Upon closer inspection (not too close though), I came to the realization that what I was looking at kind of looked like a pile of poo. Yep, I'm not going to sugar coat this, what I saw really looked like it came from the digestive tract of something. The question was...what in the world was going into our window well to relieve itself? I'll tell you this much, whatever had left these UBOs for us was by no means a small creature (if you get my meaning).

Thankfully, we were running late for Sunday dinner at my parents house, so our analysis of the UBOs were cut short since we had to get a move on. But, as we drove there our conversation once again turned to the window well as we both tried to figure out a logical explanation to how the poo came to be there.



It seemed unlikely that a large neighborhood dog was somehow awkwardly lowering the back half of his body into the well just to do his business. It also seemed unlikely (although admittedly somewhat more gross to contemplate) that a child or teenager would have committed this foul deed. We thought maybe raccoons were to blame, but to be honest we thought that perhaps our UBOs were too large to have come from that particular species.



Thankfully for all involved we tabled the discussion once we arrived at my parents house & instead focused on hearing about their wonderful cruise to Greece and Turkey -- which is obviously much more appropriate dinner conversation than what was lurking in the back regions of our minds.



Once dinner had concluded we decided to do a consult with my parents and see if they had any brilliant ideas on what could have deposited the UBOs (I have a feeling we will not be getting any dinner invitations anytime soon from anyone who reads this blog....). Raccoons were once again brought up a likely source, but none of us seemed to know what Raccoon droppings looked like. (Which is honestly something I think we can all be happy about.)



So, we did what anyone with an Internet connection handy does when faced with a question. We typed the words "raccoon scat" into Google to get a visual. Honestly, I have to say that this was something I really never dreamed I'd be using the Internet for, but low and behold we got the photos we were after (Ewww...) and discovered that apparently our window well had become a LATRINE for a COMMUNITY of raccoons. Umm...let me repeat that news again. We were dealing with a community latrine for a large group of rodents. On one hand, you got it hand it to the raccoons - you kind of have to respect an animal that is organized enough to do such a thing. On the other hand...EWWWW!!!

On every website that Google directed us to were giant warnings about the dangers of raccoon scat. The words blindness and death were used heavily in all of the articles and each one seemed to link back to an article written by the CDC. Suddenly the odd little UBOs we discovered earlier had become a life threatening bio-hazard. Darn raccoons!

Needless to say, we scoured the the Internet for advice on how to safely rid ourselves of the raccoon poo. Information in hand, Mr. Crackers bravely donned surgical gloves upon our return home to dispose of the poo ...and the rocks that touched the poo...and some of the soil below the rocks that touched the poo... and the shovel that touched the rocks and the poo and...(you get the picture).

Once the actual scat had been double bagged and thrown into the trash, I dumped 2 gallons of boiling water over the ground in what we will now refer to as the FORMER raccoon community latrine. Apparently the boiling water kills all the bacteria and (shudder, shudder) all of the roundworm eggs on contact.

As a safety precaution Mr. Crackers and I then poured about 2 cups of bleach onto the ground and then scattered moth balls on top of the whole kit and caboodle. I'm not sure what the moth balls were for, but my Dad thought they might discourage the raccoons from coming back again. Honestly, I was pretty willing to do just about anything to keep the raccoons from depositing more possible blindness and death into my basement window wells.


Mr. Crackers checked on everything this morning & I am happy to report we think the raccoons have moved their latrine somewhere else (either that or they are all crossing their little paws until tonight). The bad news is that he discovered an old and (thankfully) smaller pile of scat in another window well. Dang it! I guess I know what we'll be doing tonight...