In the previous blog, I related the tale of the fearless raccoon where the little critter was last seen going under my porch. How many raccoons or other forms of wildlife were under there with it was unknown. The live trap, baited with dog food, was undisturbed. I tried Friskies Seafood Buffet. The next morning, the trap was sprung; the door firmly in place, the buffet platter clean as a whistle, but no raccoon. ????
If I had known about the blog Straight From the Padded Cell , I would have used Twinkies as bait. Yes, Twinkies. Seems raccoons love Twinkies. Who knew?
That afternoon, I am driving across town when the cell phone rings. It’s the Missus.
“That raccoon is in the backyard again and my dog is out there barking at it.”
This was not good as I suspected the critter might be diseased, possibly rabies. The dog was up to date on his shots but…
The Missus went on to say that at one point, the raccoon had rolled over on its back like a playful puppy before disappearing back to its new prime real estate under my porch. Strange. Was it someone’s pet? Was it the plaything of some poor sickly child somewhere, escaped from its cage, and lost? Was there a little girl crying herself to sleep every night, calling out for her beloved Ricky Raccoon?
I decided to seek expert advice. Not living within the city limits, I called the County Sheriff’s office. No, they did have an animal control department. No, they did not have anyone to deal with it. The dispatcher did put me in touch with the game warden but he was out of town and would be for three days.
“Do you have a gun?” the game warden asks. I did.
“If you shoot it, burn the body,” he says, “so that no other animal will scavenge it and become infected.”
Uh, okay.
The raccoon wars had taken an ugly turn.
Two hours later, the raccoon reappears. Decision time. I grab my firearm and ease outside. The animal sees me but instead of running off, it turned and…fell over. That was the clincher. The littler critter had serious health problems, not sure what, but shooting it seemed like the merciful thing to do.
As for following the game warden’s advice to burn the body, that idea was rejected. The land around me is as dry as the proverbial tinder box with highly flammable dead leaves in all directions. I found another solution but that will remain untold.
I just hope the raccoon wasn’t named Ricky.
Monday, March 28, 2011
Monday, March 21, 2011
Raccoon Wars Reignite: Tension escalates
The area in dispute, my own personal Gaza Strip, is once again being threatened by insurgents. Silently they come in the dead of night from secret hiding places, deep in the heart of the forest, wearing masks of anonymity, to raid the avian storage facilities commonly known as bird feeders. Some call them raccoons; I call them thieves, pirates, and sons-a-bitches.
Oh sure, they’re cute all right with their bright and shining eyes, perky ears, and twitchy whiskers. Do not be fooled! The little buggers will rob you of every seed on the farm and grin while they do it. There is a long history of backyard battles here at the humble abode. Every possible means of non-violent persuasion was used to combat the theft of the highly expensive black oil sunflower seed. The following list is of failed attempts to thwart the pillage:
• Squirrel proof feeders with self closing ports.
• The use of tube feeders with collapsing perches.
• The use of “squirrel proof” plastic shields that tilt with any weight.
• Suspension of feeders hung from a cable with a minimum of five feet from feeder to ground.
• The use of 4” PVC pipe on the above mentioned cable after a coonie was observed hanging upside down and going hand over hand, paw over paw, (or is it foot over foot?) directly to his objective.
At long last, a solution was found. I ran across an ad for a fence charger especially designed to keep critters out of gardens. The electrical pulse felt by the animals that came in contact was not lethal but as the ad described, it would be memorable.
Did it work? Oh, yeah. It worked so well, that after one week of use, I unplugged the device, never to be insulted by coonie raids again. Even the squirrels quickly learned that it was in their best interest to leave the territory…until last Saturday.
There, only 30 feet from the backdoor, a coonie was strutting around under the feeders like he owned the place and this in broad daylight, high noon in fact. As I stepped through the door, the brazen little bastard stood his ground and stared at me like “Yeah, what the hell do you want? You want a piece of me? C’mon.”
Well, I must admit to being a little intimidated. A daylight raid, alone, and seemingly unarmed? What matter of intruder was this? A new breed, honed through generations of battle, with a genetic DNA of fearlessness and cunning? We glared at each other for several moments before the coonie flinched and retreated to a tree where he continued to give me the evil eye but from the relative safety of a 15 foot high branch.
I began to wonder about his state of health. Considering the odd hour of his appearance and boldness, could it be rabid? Now I have seen raccoons in the late stages of distemper where they show their teeth and wobble around but this particular animal showed none of the signs as the one pictured below that I found in the woods.
With visions of coon vs. cat battles and the inevitable vet bills, not to mention my own risk of dying a horrible death from rabies, I needed a plan. The problem was, I had no idea how to get a raccoon out of a tree without the use of deadly force and since I wasn’t sure the thing was actually diseased, I watched from the window and thought about it. Two hours later, it was still up there.
I had wandered off in pursuit of other diversions, when the Missus calls out, “The coon just went under the back deck.” Not good. Not good at all. There is an opening between the earth and the flooring of the deck that the cats love to crawl through and do whatever they do under there. The room beneath the deck now had double occupancy, or so we feared.
But minutes passed with no screams of pain or cries of battle. Perhaps the felines had checked out. As of this writing, that’s where the situation stands, tense but stable. I have set up a live trap just outside the opening where the coonie disappeared and baited it with juicy doggy treats. If and when it is captured, Mr. Raccoon will be relocated to more natural surroundings with woods, a clear stream full of tasty crayfish, and beautiful young female raccoons… or males, depending on which way he swings.
The saga continues.
Oh sure, they’re cute all right with their bright and shining eyes, perky ears, and twitchy whiskers. Do not be fooled! The little buggers will rob you of every seed on the farm and grin while they do it. There is a long history of backyard battles here at the humble abode. Every possible means of non-violent persuasion was used to combat the theft of the highly expensive black oil sunflower seed. The following list is of failed attempts to thwart the pillage:
• Squirrel proof feeders with self closing ports.
• The use of tube feeders with collapsing perches.
• The use of “squirrel proof” plastic shields that tilt with any weight.
• Suspension of feeders hung from a cable with a minimum of five feet from feeder to ground.
• The use of 4” PVC pipe on the above mentioned cable after a coonie was observed hanging upside down and going hand over hand, paw over paw, (or is it foot over foot?) directly to his objective.
At long last, a solution was found. I ran across an ad for a fence charger especially designed to keep critters out of gardens. The electrical pulse felt by the animals that came in contact was not lethal but as the ad described, it would be memorable.
Did it work? Oh, yeah. It worked so well, that after one week of use, I unplugged the device, never to be insulted by coonie raids again. Even the squirrels quickly learned that it was in their best interest to leave the territory…until last Saturday.
There, only 30 feet from the backdoor, a coonie was strutting around under the feeders like he owned the place and this in broad daylight, high noon in fact. As I stepped through the door, the brazen little bastard stood his ground and stared at me like “Yeah, what the hell do you want? You want a piece of me? C’mon.”
Well, I must admit to being a little intimidated. A daylight raid, alone, and seemingly unarmed? What matter of intruder was this? A new breed, honed through generations of battle, with a genetic DNA of fearlessness and cunning? We glared at each other for several moments before the coonie flinched and retreated to a tree where he continued to give me the evil eye but from the relative safety of a 15 foot high branch.
With visions of coon vs. cat battles and the inevitable vet bills, not to mention my own risk of dying a horrible death from rabies, I needed a plan. The problem was, I had no idea how to get a raccoon out of a tree without the use of deadly force and since I wasn’t sure the thing was actually diseased, I watched from the window and thought about it. Two hours later, it was still up there.
I had wandered off in pursuit of other diversions, when the Missus calls out, “The coon just went under the back deck.” Not good. Not good at all. There is an opening between the earth and the flooring of the deck that the cats love to crawl through and do whatever they do under there. The room beneath the deck now had double occupancy, or so we feared.
But minutes passed with no screams of pain or cries of battle. Perhaps the felines had checked out. As of this writing, that’s where the situation stands, tense but stable. I have set up a live trap just outside the opening where the coonie disappeared and baited it with juicy doggy treats. If and when it is captured, Mr. Raccoon will be relocated to more natural surroundings with woods, a clear stream full of tasty crayfish, and beautiful young female raccoons… or males, depending on which way he swings.
The saga continues.
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Hear That Lonely Whistle Blow?
For the past few weeks, my sleep cycle has been totally screwed up. I don’t know why. It’s not like I’m under stress, nothing traumatic, no upheavals in my lifestyle. Well, there was almost one when I recently received an e-mail from someone named Anna22 from the United Kingdom. Anna said she had seen my profile on a blog site and thought we had enough things in common to “click”. I was about to get excited thinking that at last, I had found someone with a grandpa fetish and someone to “click” with, whatever that meant. But the very next mail in my inbox was from the blog website apologizing for the spam. The world’s shortest e-mail affair had ended before it began. But I digress.
The sleep interruptions have molded themselves into a predictable cycle starting with the one around 12:30. This one really sucks. When you’ve only been asleep for an hour or so and suddenly find yourself wide awake, you’re looking at a whole night ahead of you staring at a ceiling wondering what the hell just happened to disrupt your dream about Anna22.
Then, like the ghosts of Christmas past, the second interruption comes along right about 3:00 a.m. This one is familiar. It’s the call to the commode. Nothing to worry about here and soon Anna22 is back.
The third wakeup call at 5:30 is the sleep killer. Now it’s only a short time to daylight when the cat population comes alive, demanding to be fed or scratching at the door to be let out. Why? Because some cats I know are too proud to use the litter box and signal their staff to let them out for their own personal call to nature. (Yes, I’m talking about you Brat Cat) At this hour, It’s almost too late to go back to sleep and even though I’m now retired, my body clock is set to seven for the start of the day. But I try for a few more minutes of shuteye anyway. I’m keeping my eyes closed, making my mind blank (never that hard for me), trying not to think about Anna22 when I hear a train whistle. Now the nearest track, as far as I know, is four miles away. You can’t hear a train four miles away (can you?) yet there it is again… and again. After the third or fourth toot, I sense a pattern; two long blasts, then a short, followed by another long. Is it a signal of some kind? Is the engineer blowing secret code to his wife or girlfriend as he passes through town in the dead of night? Is it Anna22?
I give it up and stumble into my makeshift office, home of the computer. As usual, Google has an answer. It is a code but there is nothing personal about it. The sequence of two longs, a short, and a long is required by the railroad at the approach of an intersection. The blasts shall be of a duration no shorter than fifteen seconds and no longer than twenty. Four short blasts? That train is about to back up and you better watch out.
It was disappointing, in a way, to learn that the lonesome whistle in the night had no romantic meaning, no mysterious code to a lover listening from their bed, no lonely woman with a grandfather fetish, not even one from the United Kingdom. My nights just got more boring.
The sleep interruptions have molded themselves into a predictable cycle starting with the one around 12:30. This one really sucks. When you’ve only been asleep for an hour or so and suddenly find yourself wide awake, you’re looking at a whole night ahead of you staring at a ceiling wondering what the hell just happened to disrupt your dream about Anna22.
Then, like the ghosts of Christmas past, the second interruption comes along right about 3:00 a.m. This one is familiar. It’s the call to the commode. Nothing to worry about here and soon Anna22 is back.
The third wakeup call at 5:30 is the sleep killer. Now it’s only a short time to daylight when the cat population comes alive, demanding to be fed or scratching at the door to be let out. Why? Because some cats I know are too proud to use the litter box and signal their staff to let them out for their own personal call to nature. (Yes, I’m talking about you Brat Cat) At this hour, It’s almost too late to go back to sleep and even though I’m now retired, my body clock is set to seven for the start of the day. But I try for a few more minutes of shuteye anyway. I’m keeping my eyes closed, making my mind blank (never that hard for me), trying not to think about Anna22 when I hear a train whistle. Now the nearest track, as far as I know, is four miles away. You can’t hear a train four miles away (can you?) yet there it is again… and again. After the third or fourth toot, I sense a pattern; two long blasts, then a short, followed by another long. Is it a signal of some kind? Is the engineer blowing secret code to his wife or girlfriend as he passes through town in the dead of night? Is it Anna22?
I give it up and stumble into my makeshift office, home of the computer. As usual, Google has an answer. It is a code but there is nothing personal about it. The sequence of two longs, a short, and a long is required by the railroad at the approach of an intersection. The blasts shall be of a duration no shorter than fifteen seconds and no longer than twenty. Four short blasts? That train is about to back up and you better watch out.
It was disappointing, in a way, to learn that the lonesome whistle in the night had no romantic meaning, no mysterious code to a lover listening from their bed, no lonely woman with a grandfather fetish, not even one from the United Kingdom. My nights just got more boring.
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