Masked Bandit

I randomly one night, decided to just look outside from the door we have to our deck. I do this almost never, and I only was doing it because I wanted to add a little bit of moonlight from the atmosphere outside, into our house so it wasn't so dark in the room. When I moved the curtain to let in some light, I saw a weird object scurrying around. I was like wtf is that?!

Raccoons are something we've seen a few times here and there, but mostly dead ones. I did see a really big one at my parents house many years ago, which is a memory I actually tucked away and didn't even remember until now writing this post haha, but the little shit that was on my deck was a raccoon! I was pissed, because there is no way a damn raccoon should be ALL the way up on my deck!

We live on the second floor, which ends up meaning our deck is an additional floor above that. That means the raccoon had to climb up the support post of TWO decks below us, plus get off the ground. How the fuck did the little asshole go ALL that way up to my deck, to come and steal some of my food?! That little shit.. lol. I am amazed that it climbed so high, but also really annoyed that it is choosing my deck to do it.

We don't see a lot of animal action on the deck, hell we don't even see many birds that are landing on it but what I do know is that my neighbor downstairs has a bird bath and a bird feeder sticking out from her deck, and I am wondering if the raccoon initially saw that and wanted to get some snacks. He figured he was already up, so fuck it, let's go up another one to see if there is anything else to eat up there?! I don't fault it for that logic, honestly.

What I do have issue with though, is the fact that it's eating my damn vegetables! The little shit has stolen the tomatoes that I am growing, and barely eaten them which was annoying lol. It picked off about 5 tomatoes that I know of and partially ate them, and mostly took some bites out of them and left them behind. That's not cool man! So now I have to figure out how to deter the little shit from coming up on my deck.

We've got several plants on our deck, and my tomatoes and peppers are the most important part of it because we spent so much time and effort growing the things. I figured that we may get birds visiting, but I never thought that we would be victims from a raccoon haha.

I haven't gotten any pictures of the little shit, because I only saw him the first night and I didn't have my phone in my hand when I went to look outside, since I don't really need it.. so I saw the shit, turned on the light to scare him and it ran off when I went to go get my phone and grab a photo. We are going to figure out what to install or do to try and deter the thing from visiting my deck, but I think one of the primary things I need to do is talk to my neighbor and give her a heads up that she also needs to take some steps to get rid of the shit!

What about you, have you had to deal with a raccoon problem before? How did you solve it? Let me know some tips in the comments!