JulieQ, other posters have given you good information here, so I can only add my two cents' worth from working in animal control for some years. The photo is adorable, and shows an apparently very healthy, very young raccoon; and I can tell you from experience that raccoons with rabies typically act and look very ill and abnormal. However, it is never either wise or safe to closely approach or especially to corner any wild animal; they will defend themselves if they can't escape, just as we would in the same circumstances.
Raccoons have adapted beautifully to living around humans; they exist all around us in cities, suburbs, and rural areas, and we often are unaware of their presence until they bring themselves to our attention in some way - as by raiding bird feeders, pet food, trash cans, and ponds, which are among their favorite scavenging sites. They are often active in daylight or twilight, and this alone is not a sign of illness. Raccoons do not instinctively fear humans; their mothers typically teach the young to be very cautious around humans and dogs, both species being responsible for a lot of injury and/or death for their species. It's quite possible that the two young ones you saw are orphaned, or that mother was watching them from a distance; if the mother was present, you did nothing to threaten the babies, so she'd have seen no reason to risk intervening.
If you want to deter them from visiting your property, you need to remove all food sources, at least during dark hours; the bird feeders especially need to be brought inside, put in garage, etc. for the night. Like most of us, raccoons are creatures of habit; once they find a reliable food source, they will continue to visit. If removing the feeders is not practical, you can spray the seed with a taste repellent like Ropel or tabasco sauce; the birds won't mind, the raccoons certainly will. Put something heavy like a cinder block on your trash cans or curb-side dumpster; raccoons are amazingly good with front paw manual dexterity, and can make a mess of trash in their search for food. If you can consistently eliminate the food sources around your home, they will move on in search of greener pastures.
The bottom line is that I would not panic about the fear of rabies or attack by a mother raccoon as long as you keep your distance from the young ones. Yes, theoretically female raccoons can pass the virus to the young in their uterus, assuming they live long enough to deliver. But this is unlikely, and it's even more unlikely that the young would survive to the age in your photo without succumbing to the disease. And in any case, transmission to anyone else would require very close contact, usually a bite or other immediate contact between the saliva of an infected raccoon to the broken skin of a new animal or person. You simply need to decide if you want to discourage the raccoons from visiting your property; if you do, as do most people, you need to make it unattractive by removing all food sources for quite some time, until they get discouraged and move elsewhere in their daily foraging.
Good luck, and please keep us posted-
Ruth
