E-Mail This Article to a Friend WILD KINGDOM Letting live BY KRISTEN LOMBARDI

Raccoons thrive where people live. They leech off our dining habits and lick up our trash. Indeed, they’ve become so fond of human contact that 20 times more raccoons live in urban settings than in rural ones.

I learned this from the Cape Wildlife Center, in West Barnstable, which just launched a Web site (www.capewildlife.org) that gives fast, useful advice to Massachusetts residents who bump up against indigenous fauna. But I’d already learned about raccoons firsthand.

One predawn morning in March, my husband and I awoke to the most frightful, gut-wrenching sound. At the time, in my sleep-induced haze, I was reminded of two cats having sex. The noise was painful, shrill, and obviously not human. But then it stopped, so I dozed back to sleep.

Four weeks later, the sound returned. This time, it emanated from under the floor beneath my bed. I soon discovered that the noise outside my home the month before had not come from the frolicking of some cute, cuddly pet. Rather, a female raccoon had set up her den under the floorboards of my apartment, where she gave birth to a litter of cubs. Now, the raccoon family was making its presence known. There were high-pitched moans. Inhuman moans. The kind that conjures up images of sick and twisted animal-bashing stunts.

Over the weeks and, yes, months, as the babies grew, they got fussy. They scratched. They scrambled around. They chittered and purred. And, of course, they shit. A lot, and the stench from their feces and urine permeated my apartment.

Evidently, it was a situation made for the Cape Wildlife Center. When I received a press release announcing the Center’s venture into cyberspace earlier this week, I took a quick peak at the site. There, I uncovered information on the most problematic mammals for us humans — coyotes, snakes, squirrels, skunks, bats, and so on. According to the Center, the best thing to do about raccoons inhabiting your space is to tolerate them. But that’s easier said than done. So the staff also recommends "gentle harassment" to encourage the raccoons to move on. Some common methods include shining lights near their den in the daytime; blasting talk radio in their general direction; even dousing a rag in ammonia and tossing it beside them.

Since I didn’t have access to the Center’s site last spring, I didn’t do any of those things. Instead, my husband and I called the City of Boston’s Animal Control Department, which informed us that, contrary to its title, it only deals with pets. We called a trapper, who estimated the cost to lure out the mother raccoon at $600, with an additional $300 for each cub. In the end, we plugged our ears and noses and waited it out. After two months of crying and making noise, the raccoons finally left, in May. We’ve since boarded up a hole under our back porch, where we suspect the raccoon entered the house.

So, it seems, even city dwellers can "peacefully co-exist," as the Wildlife Center likes to say, with the wild mammals among us. For the short term, at least.