It happens all the time in North America—a female raccoon finds a hole in a roof, a loose board on a porch, or a way into a crawl space and sets up house, often raising a family.  

When they're discovered, the incredibly intelligent animals are often trapped and killed.  

To solve the raccoon problem humanely, researchers have been testing a method called “eviction, exclusion, removal, reunion.”  

With this technique, animal control experts wait until the mother leaves the nest, then remove the babies and block mom from reentering. The babies are placed in a safe space nearby. When the mother finds them, she moves them to a backup nest outside the home. (Watch a mother raccoon teach her baby to climb a tree.) 

With a grant from the National Geographic Society Expeditions Council, he put cameras at raccoon nesting sites around Washington, D.C., and