Is there a trick to be able to spot one or a special setup to attract. I have been hunting 13 hours and only two have shown up in the three gardens and I missed them both by seconds. Seems a bit much spending over 800 gold and still nowhere to be found.

just extremely rare   luck of the draw to get one and more rare to actually get it

Last time I needed it for a quest it was a nightmare I gave up after 3 days because I just could not get one to show up in mine I actually contacted support but got nothing back …. I know they are rare but it was actually crazy to not have 1 in 3 days unfortunately there’s no tricks ! Just patience which I ran out of X

The only thing you can do is setup for racoons on the birthday cake and attract as many as you can. On the attracting side that means multiple attractants with a pink cap or a supershroom and try not to attract anything else that would eat the cake. I'd guess 2 attracting plants with supershroom, and 3 or 4 with a pink cap.

If there's only a few gardens attracting them, then I'd spread the search over more days and water a bit slower to conserve gold.  Maybe ask more people to do the setup so that you can spread the sprinkles out more as they stay 30 minutes. 

I can also see that if someone wants racoons in general that birthday cake is a really good option as you can get free organic birthday cake to feed them instead of feeding them normal organic food that costs gold.

I think they are only attracted to the 10th anniversary birthday cake which is harder to find. Lots of 15ths.

I hosted the b'day kinkajou on 10th cake last month.  I found it difficult to find / get the 10th cake then.  So, that could be part of the problem.

Thanks everyone.  I finally spotted one today. Yesterday there were three gardens and a total of 8 cakes between them. Only three showed up on all those plates. I also wrote to support. As luck would have it, all gardens attracted while I slept. I had a couple lovely fairies set up today and I got super lucky … if you want to call it that. 🤭