Living at the edge of a nature preserve has its benefits… and its costs. We get to interact with nature; lots of nature. According to the Chinese zodiac, this is the Year of the Tiger – but not in these parts. This is definitely the Year of the Rodent.
At the beginning of the year it was mice. We’d never seen any before, but we had a spill of birdseed in the pantry and a mouse discovered it. Pretty soon, the pantry became a home away from home for our little furry friend. Being kind-hearted folk, we got a clever “humane trap” and caught the little bugger and took him far away. To be safe, we reset the trap and waited. Sure enough, we got another one. But after another week or so with no action, we put away the trap and thought our mice troubles were over.
A couple of months later, I started hearing lots of little noises in the attic above my study and eventually we called in a pest control service. It turned out that there were lots of mice living up there. Well, they eventually took care of that and sealed up the various openings around the house that the mice were using.
With the arrival of summer, we encountered a whole new rodent problem. We have fruit trees in our back yard and for twelve years have fought battles against insects, fungus and unpredictable weather trying to get peaches, plums and cherries. This year, it was squirrels. We’ve shared our land with squirrels (or perhaps it is the other way around) for years but they never showed any interest in the fruit trees. Until now. One or more of our squirrels decided to harvest our fruit -- all of it. It was systematic, comprehensive and efficient. And we are talking hundreds of peaches and plums. Eventually I tried attaching metal flashing around the base of a peach tree to make it hard to climb. But the squirrel(s) found other ways up into the tree. So no fruit for humans this year.
Last but not least are our tomatoes. For several years, we have grown tomatoes in some great big pots on the patio where we can keep an eye on the plants and water them automatically with a drip system. It worked great a couple of years ago; last year was terrible, but that was weather-related. This year all seemed well at first but as soon as the first tomato was nearly ripe, something ate about half of it right on the vine. And it wasn’t a horn worm. This was something bigger.
We have lots of suspects around here but the most likely candidate was a rabbit. The bunnies have been multiplying like crazy for the past few years – probably since there don’t seem to be foxes around like in earlier years. They wreak havoc with our flowering plants, but never seemed interested in the tomatoes. Then, of course, there are the squirrels, which already seem to have taken some correspondence courses on expanding their diets.
Determined to win at least one more battle in the rodent wars, I built a big wooden cage with walls of bird netting and placed it around the tomato plants. I hoped that it would discourage squirrels and bunnies from further marauding. After a day or so, another tomato got chomped. So then I tried twist-tying plastic baggies around the ripening tomatoes. I happened to look out the window early the next morning and lo-and-behold, a chipmunk was clinging to the plant with its face inside the plastic bag (didn’t it know that was dangerous?), chowing down on a tomato. I got its attention and it skittered around for a moment and then scooted out under one of the sides of the cage.
With the enemy identified, the battle was joined. I figured that there was no foolproof way to prevent the thing from getting to the tomatoes, so I decided to get rid of him. I went out and got a “Have-a-Hart” trap and set it up with a variety of goodies, including a half-eaten tomato, some oatmeal and some peanut butter. Nothing doing for a couple of days. Then Rachel reminded me that we once had a chipmunk decimate our sunflower plants to get to the seeds. So I added sunflower seeds to the peanut butter glob in the trap. The next morning, we had a chipmunk in captivity. I took him for a ride several miles away to another part of the nature preserve and send him on his way.
I read up on chipmunks and learned that they are territorial and that there are generally two to four to an acre. So I reset the trap and waited. Sure enough, in a day or so, we had another one. I figured that we had taken care of Simon and Alvin but not Theodore. So back to the peanut butter and sunflower seeds. Two days later, we got chipmunk number three. The good news was that we also have had several quite delicious tomatoes and the plants are now looking much happier without little rodents climbing all over them. I’m trying not to think of the cost per tomato figuring in the cage, the trap, wear-and-tear on my car in the chipmunk relocation program, etc.
On the other hand, yesterday we caught chipmunk number four (and we’d already run out of cartoon names) and this morning we caught number five. [added later the same day - caught number six...]
How many of these things do we have? Are peanut butter and sunflower seeds an irresistible siren’s call that beckons chipmunks from far away? Am I going to spend next summer trapping squirrels?
There are many things to ponder in the Year of the Rodent.
