The next Toronto? Reports of urban raccoons on the rise in Calgary

Sean Halvorsen never thought he would be sharing his house with a raccoon.

That changed about a month ago, when his son caught a glimpse of a black-and-white bandit atop their McKenzie Lake home.

“All of a sudden the cat freaked out and my son looked out and saw what he thought was a cat, but it was actually a raccoon on the roof,” he said.

“That’s where I first realized I might have a raccoon problem.”

Raccoons are seldom seen in most of Alberta, where harsh winters and abundant predators are among the challenges they’ve faced. Unlike in other urban centres like Toronto and Vancouver, where they’ve garnered reputations as mischievous “trash pandas,” Calgary’s raccoons prefer to lay low in the city’s many forested areas and green spaces.

A couple weeks after the roof incident, when a neighbour told him they had seen a raccoon enter his garage, Halvorsen decided enough was enough.

“I heard a whole bunch of rustling going on up in the roof, so [I realized] I for sure have a raccoon problem,” he said.

Halvorsen decided that, as cute as raccoons are, the mammal wasn’t welcome in his home.

“I was like, ‘I have an old can of bear spray, maybe I can poke that up there,’ but then the more rational side of me eventually thought maybe I should call some professional help.”

He hired Calgary-based Peregrine General Pest Control, and the company successfully evicted the raccoon without harming it.

“The raccoon has vacated, so it’s obviously worth the money,” Halvorsen said.

On top of getting rid of the raccoon, Halvorsen said the pest control company performed a full inspection of his house to proactively seal other potential entry points to prevent future issues with wildlife.

26 raccoon calls so far this year, pest control company says

Stephen Hoare, Peregrine General Pest Control’s service manager, says calls about raccoon problems have been on the rise, with calls this year among the highest the company’s ever experienced.

Hoare says when he entered the pest control industry in 2017, the company received only one or two raccoon calls a year, which were typically incidents involving animals accidentally transported from British Columbia in shipping containers or vehicles.

“But as our winters have been getting warmer and warmer, it seems every year we’ve getting more and more calls,” Hoare said.

He said raccoon calls have increased by at least 10 per cent year-over-year. While calls averaged about 10 per season between 2020 and 2022, they rose to 20 last year, and have already reached 26 this year.

“It’s been of a bit of an experience learning how to handle raccoons,” he said. “It’s taken years for us to to figure out the best way to evict them out of someone’s attic.”

One of their tried-and-true methods involves using a “raccoon eviction lure” — male raccoon urine purchased from a distributor — to get female raccoons with young to leave of their own accord.

“That makes the female raccoon think that a male is in the area, and that’s why it wants to grab its kits and leave to go find another place to live that they feel is much safer,” Hoare said, pointing to the fact that male raccoons will kill a female’s offspring in an effort to mate.

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Other options include using specialized one-way doors to get the raccoons out, as well as live trapping — though that can be problematic.

“When you trap something something and relocate it more than five kilometres from its home zone, it can be a bit of a death sentence at times,” Hoare said. “It’s giving it a 50 per cent chance of actually surviving.”

The company tries to avoid lethal control as much as possible.

“We want to get them out of the home and they’re all good, they can go back to the river system and be living in tree hollows where they typically like to be,” he said.

Where do Calgary’s raccoons typically live?

Halvorsen and his neighbours are no stranger to raccoons in the southeast community of McKenzie Lake, which borders Fish Creek Provincial Park.

“We’ve had some Christmas cookies out [on the deck] and they got into them,” Halvorsen said of the raccoons. “They actually opened the Tupperware up with their paws.”

Raccoon populations are found in every Canadian province except Newfoundland and Labrador, though sightings have been known to happen there.

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According to the Alberta government, raccoons have traditionally lived primarily in the province’s southeast region but have expanded their range to include urban and rural areas throughout Alberta.

Data from professional wildlife biologists and citizen scientists points to rising raccoon numbers in Calgary.

Wildlife biologist Sara Jordan-McLachlan, who works extensively with urban wildlife in Calgary, says reports of raccoons in the city date back about three decades.

“There was always that thought that one of the reasons we weren’t seeing raccoons here was because they couldn’t survive our winters, but as we’re seeing milder winters and we’re seeing different weather patterns, I think they’re definitely able to adapt to that and it’s definitely not a barrier for them anymore,” she said.

Calgary’s raccoon populations appear to be concentrated primarily in natural areas like Fish Creek Provincial Park, Weaselhead Flats and Carburn Park.

Jordan-McLachlan compared their range expansion to that of other Calgary wildlife.

“It definitely could be that, now that they’ve established themselves in the city, that they are starting to expand out of the natural areas, kind of similar to how bobcats seemed to be only in areas like Fish Creek, and now we’re seeing them everywhere,” she said.

“So raccoons may just be becoming more established and venturing out of those natural habitats.”

But while Calgary residents and pest control companies are dealing with more raccoon encounters than ever before, Jordan-McLachlan says the population growth of these animals faces significant hurdles in the city.

“They definitely face more challenges here,” she said. “They have more competition because we do have coyotes, a very healthy coyote population which is definitely competition for them, and we also have bobcats. So they they have a steeper competition curve here comparatively to other places.”

And whether raccoons are able to successfully establish themselves in more urban areas is dependent on human behaviour as well.

“If we are presenting them with opportunities to take advantage of things that we’re doing, like leaving pet food out or not covering garbages, then we’re going to habituate them and train them that this is something that they can take advantage of, and I think we’ll see issues if we’re not careful,” Jordan-McLachlan said.