If you’re a raccoon in search of a good meal, then you want to head for Jim Blackwood’s house.

For more than a decade, the Nova Scotia man has been supplying raccoons in his backyard with a steady stream of foods such as pizza, hot dogs and fruit on a nightly basis.

Speaking to CTV’s Your Morning, Blackwood said his wife started giving food to raccoons on their property in the late 1990s. When she died in 2003, he took over the feeding duties.

“She asked me to continue on, so that’s what I’ve been doing,” he said Tuesday. “They come up and sit beside me and I feed them a meal.”

Blackwood’s menu has evolved over the years. He started with peanut butter sandwiches, but soon decided that chicken hot dogs were healthier for the raccoons and less expensive for him.

Bananas, grapes and dry dog food were later introduced to the mix. So were strawberries, but they didn’t go over so well. A local pizzeria sometimes drops off its unsold slices for the raccoons, and Blackwood has recently started offering apple tarts as a more gourmet dessert.

While the raccoons visit Blackwood’s home every night, they do not seem to rely on it as their sole source of food. Blackwood said he has analyzed the critters’ feces and found evidence that they have eaten things he has not fed them.

The retired RCMP officer has become known as the “raccoon whisperer” for his daily ritual of raccoon-feeding. He said he thought about giving up the routine last year, after a raccoon he had fed for more than 13 years died, but the rest of the raccoons convinced him otherwise.

“I said that was the end of it – but they kept coming, so I kept feeding them,” he said.

Blackwood is currently providing food for four adult raccoons and four raccooncubs, all of which he claims he can tell apart through their unique personality traits.

The raccoons feature prominently in Blackwood’s YouTube channel, which he describes online as being “basically about raccoons that visit me on a nightly basis and other videos are things that I do in everyday life.”

His more than 1,100 videos on YouTube have been viewed more than 1.6 million times. They’ve also attracted an international audience to Blackwood’s raccoon exploits. Blackwood said he has hosted visitors from all over Canada, the United States and beyond – including a woman from Cyprus who visited him for one month earlier this summer.