The trouble with Daphne
June 21, 2009
Daphne came into our lives when she was abandoned the day her mother gave birth to a new fawn behind the barn. The yearling white-tail was left to wander, and she seems to have fixed upon the walnut field next to the woods as her new home.
This has done no good for the seedlings. For a hundred-foot radius from Daphne’s bed, the taller seedlings have been trimmed back to the bark and the shorter walnuts have had their tops nipped off. For some reason Daphne prefers her meals served in the open, and from knee to shoulder height. The earlier leaves from a hundred young butternut trees kept her happy until the walnuts came on, but now she won’t be separated from her favourite food for long.
Take this morning, for example. In a rage yesterday I had chased her clean out of the field. I drove back this morning to see if this moment of uncharacteristic energy on my part had had any effect. No. Daphne greeted me with wide eyes and perked ears, but she didn’t stop munching on a tender walnut seedling until I drove up close to her. Then she moved away. I expected her to pick up my scent, flip the tail, snort and run away, hopefully to the other side of someone else’s woods. But no. She walked away about a hundred feet, then turned and started to work her way back toward me, bobbing her head from side to side and doing that alert-stupid thing deer are so good at.
O.k. It’s the running engine. I turned off the key, fully expecting this to produce panic and flight. Nope. On she came. About forty feet from the Ranger she suddenly took flight – until she thought better of it after a couple of leaps. Then she threw up her tail and dashed in a semi-circle around me and towards the woods. But she turned and came back to take up station on the other side of me. Obviously my vehicle and I were occupying the very spot on this earth where she most wanted to be, and would we please leave?
She made a couple of more attempts to crowd me out of her territory, jumping, stamping her feet, and letting out these little snorts before setting off on another hell-for-leather rush to the other side of the Ranger where she started up her inquiring looks again. With seven hundred walnut trees in this field, why does she particularly want to eat this one? And it’s almost all gone.
Eventually she gave up her attempt to frighten me off and stepped over the fence and behind a large tree to await my departure.
Daphne’s rapidly growing into a beautiful animal. Her tail’s still not fully-fluffed, but she’s the lovely tan colour of a fully-grown deer in summer coat now. We’d actually love to have her around if it weren’t for the way she Hoovers my walnuts. I have spent three summers planting, mowing, watering and coddling these little trees, and she mows through them at an incredible rate.
Even camping in the field won’t work if she keeps coming back to her spot to put me out. I remember two summers ago a young coyote had his bed in another field near the woods. I nearly ran over him with a riding lawn mower one morning while on my way to trim around a line of spruces. Young fellow was a very sound sleeper. The coyote pup, as well, deeply resented my intrusion into his territory, and when I later mowed the field, he spent the day circling to try and find a safe way back to his bed, his favourite bones, and a rubber chew toy.
But he was a coyote, and defined by society as a destructive varmint, even though he caught and ate mice everywhere he went and did his best to keep the squirrels and chipmunks honest. No fate is too terrible for the local coyote. Poison, traps, grayhounds, even running down with vehicles – all are acceptable. Daphne, on the other hand, is protected by law as a natural resource, even though she is cutely chewing her way through my livelihood. Now which one is the varmint?
The Common Loon
May 10, 2009
In an English text a few years ago I came across Margaret Laurence’s Loons, which traces the loss of innocence of two Canadian girls. The title draws the reader into the story, but all the loons get to do is sit at the end of a lake and hoot. Nevertheless, Laurence uses the birds to evoke a vague bond with nature. Their extinction in the story she uses to show the girls’ loss of innocence and youth.
The author of the text fawns all over these mythical loons. The spectre of their impending doom works achingly into every note. From this prompt a student can hardly fail to generate even more fatuous hand‑wringing over the fate of the loon.
Instead of the fine art and variety of Lampman, Johnson, and Mowat, our renewed awareness of nature has left us stuck with the silhouette of a Loon plastered onto a million sweat shirts, coffee mugs and coins. The loon has become the inflatable doll of ecological guilt.
I would suggest that the real loon is a creature quite different from the popular symbol. The real loon doesn’t choke on the acidified air of Algonquin Park. He thrives on the Rideau Lakes with his brood, and screams the night away to the delighted anguish of caffeine‑soaked cottagers.
The real loon is no ecological wimp doomed to extinction from boat wakes. Newboro Lake loons bob merrily among the tidal waves thrown up by passing Sea Rays, Bayliners, and Dorals as the annual spawning run of Quebec boaters arrives. Biologists quake in horror, but the loon families calmly nest on sides of islands away from raucous boat traffic. Loons didn’t get this far without the ability to adapt.
Real loons can be a bit of a nuisance. What fisherman can tend his line when a dozen or so loons are conducting a Sunday morning church service, swimming in a large circle in that eerie dipping ritual?
I’m not so sure about their mythical fish‑finding abilities either, because if the boats out trolling start to cluster in one location, the loons are soon on the scene. I’m waiting for one to ask to use my depth sounder.
On the water they are good company, if they’d only stay there. You’d think that with all that water, and fish everywhere, loons would be content to stay wherever they happened to be. But no: about quitting time they start yakking back and forth to each other, sometimes from a mile or more away. Try talking to anyone while this is going on. Worse, they decide to switch lakes, or get together for a drink. This involves several minutes of confusion for everyone, as they taxi, take off, yell at each other, land again, and finally depart. They’re a little awkward when entering and leaving the water, and they tend to distract boaters from more appropriate activities such as crunching ice cubes and polishing Tupperware.
Then comes morning. Loons love to sneak up on anchored yachts. I think they like the smell of coffee and bacon. (No morning skinny dips allowed in Loon Country.) Anxious dogs must be rowed ashore, or else lost to a morning of loon‑tag.
Honest. Loons try their best to separate dogs from their boats. I have photos of three of them trying to entice my spaniel off our swim platform. Once Patch joined them in the water, they’d see how far from the boat they could get him to swim. They’d take turns. They’d let him get dangerously close, only to speed up, just out of reach. If I’d call him back, they’d come too.
Loon mug in hand, the reader will insist that loons are only protecting their nests when they do this. Since when do loons nest a half‑mile from shore? I think they came to our anchorage because they’re bored.
The only good thing which I can say about loons is that they don’t beg handouts. Unlike the mallards and sea gulls of the area, the loons ask nothing but an occasional bushel of splake or bass fingerlings from the Ministry of the Environment stocking program. Apart from that they are sufficient unto themselves.
Perhaps loons are good symbols for the writer. They do have an other‑worldly aura. They don’t bunch up and litter docks and beaches the way Canada geese do in cities. Loons stay wild without the help of birdshot.
Perhaps loonies are useful coins. Northern Reflections shirts and Algonquin Park promotional materials could contain less pleasing logos.
Perhaps I should join the trend, rather than laugh at it. For Christmas gifts, what would be better than loon slippers? Just think. You wake up at night. You want to raid the fridge, but must not click that light switch and wake the family. You shuffle into your new loon slippers and begin the trek to the kitchen. You get there without mishap, because last night the sleeping spaniel found himself on the receiving end of a loon slipper, and he’ll never lie at the top of the stairs again. He now sleeps on his back, snoring in disgust, between the magazine rack and the fireplace. No more loon slippers for him.
The long goodbye
May 3, 2009
She lies and sleeps, utterly still on her bed and we tiptoe around the house so as not to disturb her, even though she is deaf. Our old springer spaniel, Moody Blue, is on her last legs, and it is very hard to say goodbye.
I used to teach new classes a lesson on Robert Frost’s two-line poem, The Old Dog.
The old dog barks backward without getting up.
I can remember when he was a pup.
But in Blue’s case we don’t remember when she was a pup. We adopted her at nearly seven years of age. All of her formative experiences were with another family, her handlers, and various breeders. Blue, you see, was a champion show dog, and raised four litters of pups. If you see a good looking, even-tempered black and white springer in the Ottawa Valley, there’s a good chance it came from Maberly and one of Blue’s litters.
So why was a great dog like this up for adoption, and how did she end up with us? Well, the story has it that she bounced back to the breeder because, when her owners brought home a new kitten, she promptly killed it. When Diane Herns told us this, Bet and I in unison responded, “And?” The odd indiscretion in a hunting dog is only to be expected.
Life with a show dog took some getting used to. She was always quiet, clean, and very obedient, but she hated dogs. That wasn’t much of a problem because we’d had lots of practice handling quirky mutts. The swimming lessons were a challenge, though. Honest, she didn’t know how to swim, and what’s more, she was a very slow learner at ladder-climbing, jumping from docks, and the other skills we had come to expect of a spaniel. What kind of life does a show dog have?
Another thing which threw us at first was strangers’ reactions when they saw Blue. In the evening we often went by golf cart to Chaffey’s Locks for ice cream. Blue heard “SHE”S BEAUTIFUL!” so often that first summer that I think she started to think we’d given her a new name. There she’d stand, outside the Opinicon Store, poised on her mat in the box of the golf cart as she made nice to every potential judge who came her way. Did I mention that Blue was an uncommonly good looking dog?
As she adjusted to life in our home (no worries about her jumping in the pool, anyway) and the boat (major dog-avoidance strategies were indicated), Blue seemed happy to take the new routines in stride. The farm was another matter entirely. A model lives her life hungry, but at the farm Blue proved a true garbage gut, and after a few expensive trips to the vet because of mysterious ailments from things she had eaten, we decided Grandma had to rein in her compost heap, and that pasture romps were not a success.
At the marina one trick at which Blue excelled was the “Stay!” command. Her favourite place to “Stay!” was on the wide ledge behind the stern seat of our boat, WYMBADIITY II. One day a bemused woman came up to me and explained, “I was just admiring that very realistic stuffed animal on the stern of your boat when it suddenly sneezed, woke up, and looked straight at me. It was real!” In fact Blue bore a striking resemblance to that popular toy.
Once when a former student invited our boat to her wedding to use as a prop for photographs, I heard her uncle joke about the young woman’s beauty while we snapped away at the happy couple: “She’s just like a dog: you can’t take a bad picture of a dog.”
This poise in front of a camera was Blue’s true talent, and it endeared her to everyone in the family. She was our son’s model and muse in his early days as a portrait photographer. Even in her declining months, she still groomed up nicely and would work with anyone holding a camera who approached her.
As Charlie brought pals to the house, Blue developed another reputation on Twitter as perhaps the dumbest dog to draw breath this century. Part of this no doubt came from Blue’s vanity: she always made sure she was standing in the right light, and with proper posture. Turns out this meant posing in front of every car entering the driveway. She would just blithely walk into the path of a moving vehicle and expect it to stop and disgorge admiring humans. Then she would receive their adoration in her dim, regal manner. This was her life.
I haven’t mentioned Blue’s warm, loving manner or how fond we have become of her over the last seven years because this is a story of a dog, not of private angst. Blue’s passing will mark the end of an era in our family, and tear a large hole out of our lives, as the passing of a dog always does. It is for this loss alone that we mourn: after a long time of quiet and dignified suffering, the poor dog will at last be without pain.
Coyotes I Have Known
January 12, 2009
Margaret Brand’s “Coyote population still on the rise” in the January 8 edition of The Review-Mirror quotes Scott Smithers of the Ministry of Natural Resources: “People need to take the best measures to protect their property.” Unfortunately the second half of the article was lost in my edition of the paper, so I don’t know how it ends. I hope the conclusion will appear in the next issue as a correction, because a balanced approach to coyote management is very important.
My parents raised sheep on Young’s Hill for fifteen years and the only ewe they ever lost they blamed on Sally, the border collie. She had a temper. Mind you, Dad kept the sheep in the barn at night, and he was careful. During that time he shot two coyotes which looked as though they might cause trouble, but that was it.
All through my childhood my dad kept Walker foxhounds and hunted wolves and foxes for sport and furs. In later years, though, Mom admitted that he used to sneak out to watch the young foxes playing outside their den under the back barn.
A few years later I came under the spell of the resident bush wolf who owned our woodlot. She was a beautiful animal. While he reviled the old coyote near Elgin who was stealing his ducks, Dr. Bill Barrett became quite fond of the one on Young’s Hill while taking the hay off our fields. “The Coyote” seemed to enjoy the company of large machines, and would come out each day, take up a secure vantage point, and watch the show. Bill speculated, “She must have some dog in her, because she likes humans too much to be all coyote.”
She lived for six years in our woodlot, occasionally raised a pup as a single mother (strong evidence that she was a hybrid: coyotes raise their young as a couple), and defended her territory as well as she could against intruders. I watched from the back field one day as she dashed from one side of the barn to the other to peek at the strangers who had descended from a car at the house.
Logger Ken Carson and his assistant also became very fond of The Coyote as she kept their skidder company during his work in the woodlot in 2006. Then to their dismay, one night she died under their logging truck.
Always troubled by mange, she had lost a lot of hair off her right hip, and a January cold snap was too much. Her tracks led from a patch of thick cover across an open field and directly to the truck.
We missed her presence in the woodlot. During her life she eliminated groundhogs from the property and kept other rodents and deer honest, as well.
Since her passing we’ve had a series of critters try to fill her role. The most impressive was a large pup I first encountered one day when driving across a field on a lawn mower. Sound sleeper, that guy. I nearly drove over him before he abruptly sprang up in my path, staggered a few steps to one side, yawned mightily, then scuttled off to the woods and cover. When I eventually came upon his bed smack in the middle, I could see why he kept trying to return as I mowed: he had all his toys around the spot of matted grass he called his own. There was a large leg bone from a cow, a few other chunks of bone, and a plastic chew toy which could only have been purloined from some dog’s play area.
By fall he had grown huge. When our neighbour Paul Hargreaves saw him one day he exclaimed, “That’s no coyote, that’s a bush wolf. He’s plenty large enough to bring down a deer by himself. That’s why there are no deer on the property.”
Last winter while snowshoeing we came upon a large trench where he and his mate had obviously spent some time buried in a snowbank. Next circuit of the woods we saw two sets of fresh tracks heading east along the field, and that was the last we saw of him. This year in his absence a buck tore some of my prized butternut saplings limb for limb.
The current occupant of the post of top predator at the farm is definitely a coyote, and a particularly scraggly one, at that. I wrote at Thanksgiving about her antics in our orchard, so I won’t go into that here. I must emphasize, though, that I often follow her tracks around the property, and she seldom goes far without stopping to dig out a vole or two.
If there were more coyotes in the woodlot the situation would be very different, and Dad’s rifle would come off the rack. But I see only benefit in a single animal who shows restraint in her dealings with my mother’s cat and the humans on the property.
I hope nobody decides to eradicate the coyote population in the area. Well-established coyotes know the rules and contribute mightily to rodent control. Harmful individuals need to be identified and shot, but I heard a rumour last year of an underground bounty program sponsored by deer hunters, and that can’t be good.
Half a Nest
November 23, 2008
A few years ago a cow in our pasture worked the cover off a Wood-Miser left unattended overnight. Then she licked all of the switches to “ON”. Her vandalism destroyed the electric lift motor, the main circuit board, and our cutting schedule. This meant that my dad and Gus, the saw-mill contractor, had to finish the work without my help, the school year having begun before the last walnut log was sawn. My seventy-year-old father had little choice but to pile a couple of thousand board feet of cherry and basswood on the outdoor pile. The more valuable walnut he stacked on the part of the barn floor where I normally stored the fishing boat in winter.
I say he stacked this lumber, because without spacers between the boards it can’t dry. Piling involves placing the spacers, and the careful organization of the boards according to length and thickness. I resolved to deal with this expensive heap of black, dusty wood at first opportunity.
This turned out to be the following Sunday, so as soon as I figured that my parents were safely away at church, I dragged the sleepy teenager to the farm. I wanted to pile the lumber on top of a narrow granary on one side of the hay mow in the barn. A row of straw bales currently occupied the space, and Charlie has a mild dust allergy, so I resolved to get the bales out of there before the kid came sneezing onto the scene.
Leaving him half-asleep in the truck, I shed my rain jacket, and clad only in shorts, T-shirt and boat shoes, made my way by ladder to the top of the granary to make short work of the straw. I grabbed the first bale and dropped it down to the empty haymow below. Next bale the same. Then something hit me from behind, an impact like a blast of birdshot. All of the sudden I had hornets all over me! They kept going for my eyes and mouth. I had to get out of there, fast. The ladder was out of the question. I couldn’t wipe bees out of my eyes and climb, too. I jumped, praying I wouldn’t break a leg.
Any movie stunt man would have been proud of my leap. I landed on my feet, hopped over a plow and a low wall, then sprinted for the green field beyond the open door.
The bees stayed right with me, chewing religiously on all parts of me they could reach, especially my back. I dashed past Charlie in the truck, found a patch of smooth grass, and started to roll. This didn’t work. The dislodged bees just kept jumping back aboard. Then Charlie was slapping the bees, killing them in large numbers. More kept coming. I remember noticing that the bees weren’t stinging him, just me, and he was killing them by the dozen and I wasn’t hurting them at all. This seemed unfair.
Charlie got me into the truck, still swatting. Now bee-proof (or so we thought), the next priority seemed to be a trip to the emergency room in Smiths Falls, a half-hour away. I thought I’d drive, as Charlie had just gotten his learner’s permit, and I might be able to make better time in traffic. After a few miles I decided that this wasn’t on.
The words “bee stings” get attention in an E.R., but once they had determined that I wasn’t likely to do anything interesting like dying on them, they were content to ignore me for a while.
The dumbest thing anyone said all day was when the doctor asked me if it hurt. How does one answer a question like that? About then I noticed an exhausted hornet falling out of my shirt. “Odd,” I thought, “that little rascal has been chewing on my armpit all the way to the hospital, and I haven’t noticed.” I took off the shirt and got two more.
In an examining room where the nurse had placed me after painting my back with lotion — I guess her handiwork made me too ugly for the more public emergency room — I removed my shorts and found another hornet under the waistband. This understandably led to a thorough examination of the rest of my clothing. No more hornets.
Just for the record, my offense against the hornet kingdom consisted of tearing their nest apart. They had built a sort of bee-condominium by hollowing out two bales of straw. The second bale I picked up contained half of the nest. In return they decorated me with a total of 75 stings, not counting the ones hidden by hair and beard. Much itching later, I was left with a spectacular set of scabs over my head and upper body. For about a year after the event, bees would still home in on me as if I had a bull’s-eye painted on my nose. It must have been pheromones from the venom, or maybe they can smell panic.
I didn’t touch that lumber until I had to pry the frozen boards apart, and then I did it on a weekday. No more Sunday work on the farm for me. I got stung the last time I tried that.
Thanksgiving Visitors
October 13, 2008
As I passed by the kitchen window Thanksgiving morning I noticed a young coyote lying in the orchard, chewing merrily on an apple. Of course I stopped to watch. The critter’s enjoyment of her prize was obvious, as were her poor table manners. I guess a coyote pretty well has to chew with her mouth open, but she certainly shows a lot of teeth while eating fruit. The apple finished, she got up, moved over two trees, selected a wind-fall and returned to the same spot.
Ever alert, she alternated sharp looks in all directions with great and messy enjoyment of her meal. Her head rolled back and forth in pleasure as she chewed. A coyote reacts to even the slightest sound, so I tried chatting to her through the insulated windows. Every word I said registered on her ears, which turned like radar domes to track the sounds, though I don’t think the rest of the coyote paid much attention to me.
Her feast went on for some time. Once again I found myself marveling at the appetite of the eastern coyote. I remember last summer watching a pair consume an astounding number of mice on a trip across a field. This one must have eaten all or parts of a dozen apples before she eventually ducked behind a hedge and disappeared.
As it turned out the coyote was not the only visitor today. A drunken lout broke the screen out of our front door, disrupting dinner with a crash, only to stagger around the lawn for a bit, then fly away. The male ruffed grouse must have been hitting the grapes again. All it takes is a few falling leaves to startle a tipsy grouse and start it off on a path of self-destruction which often ends at a kitchen window. In this case the screen let go before the poor grouse’s neck snapped.
He must have decided he was in no condition to fly after his crash, because he staggered across the road in front of Bet when she was on her way home. With one look at the oncoming vehicle, he reeled off into the ditch, most likely to sleep it off until morning, and then begin the grape-game anew.
The final vistors of the day were the least welcome: the neighbour’s Holsteins have grown fed up with fences, it seems. While I had thought I had the fence all fixed, the tall black cow was having none of it and she led two of her pals over the rails for a raid on our apple trees.
Charlie happened to be driving the cart at the time with me as a passenger, so I said, “Buckle up!” and we made like a border collie in the open field. This isn’t fun any more, because I had spent all of Sunday morning fixing that fence. What was I to do now? A cow with a belly full of apples is happy to go home, and can be counted upon to find the same hole in the fence, but a hungry one feels much less co-operative, and requires a good deal of urging even to get to the fence, let alone to find a way through it.
The human visitors today were a good deal less eccentric. Charlie and Roz pulled in just in time for a photo session under the maples on the lane – I got to use Charlie’s professional Canon with the state of the art telephoto lens for some soft-background shots of the couple in front of a leafy backdrop. This required some instructions shouted from a hundred feet away: inside the viewfinder there is a galaxy of little red squares. Press a button and turn a wheel and all of the squares go away except for one. Rotate further and that off-centre red square is one you put on Charlie’s nose for a long-lens portrait. The trouble was there were two of them — two noses, and if I tried to balance the picture this camera would focus on the tree fifty feet behind them. That meant favouring one nose or the other. Oh well, at least the focus and colours were good. Charlie can crop the pictures later.
Apart from the interruption of the drunken grouse, Thanksgiving dinner went superbly. Bet had decorated the kitchen with garlands made from the many vines and wild flowers she gathered. Mom did the vegetables, Bet browned the turkey to perfection, and each baked a pie. The fresh garden potatoes were also a hit. After the meal, the various desserts and a clandestine raid on the raspberry patch, Roz found a bag of walnuts Neil Thomas had cracked for me. She plunked down in a lawn chair and started sorting the nut meat from the shells. Conversations came and went, but Roz still sorted. It was a big bag. Charlie suggested it was time to go. “That’s fine. I’ll finish sorting them in the car.” They stayed until the nuts were done.
I must admit that during this superb day I didn’t think much at all about Tuesday’s election. Regardless of the lies, distortions and statistics of the race, no matter who wins things will likely go along pretty much the same as before, and for that we can be truly thankful.
The Coyote Under the Apple Tree
October 1, 2008
As I passed by the kitchen window today a brownish object was where it shouldn’t be in the orchard below the house. I looked more closely and realized that a young coyote was lying on a patch of grass between two trees, chewing merrily on an apple.
Of course I stopped to watch. The critter’s enjoyment of the apples was obvious, as were its poor table manners. I guess a coyote pretty well has to chew with her mouth open, but she certainly shows a lot of teeth while eating fruit. The apple finished, she got up, moved over two trees, selected a wind-fall and returned to the same spot. This one is no beauty: she has a scraggly tail with a slight bend in it, matted fur, and the generally dissipated expression of someone who has seen the evil in the world — and approved of most of it.
Ever alert, she alternated sharp looks in all directions with great and messy enjoyment of her meal. Her head rolled back and forth in pleasure as she chewed. A coyote’s ears react to even the slightest sound, so I tried chatting to her through the insulated windows. Every word I said registered on her ears, which turned like radar domes to track the sounds, though I don’t think the rest of the coyote paid much attention to me.
The banquet continued, with many little forays to different trees for seconds, and then a return to her bed to eat. She doesn’t seem to like pears, but adores empires. She passed up a large, shiny winter apple in favour of those under the same tree I had whacked with the mower two days previously.
This went on for some time. Once again I found myself marveling at the appetite of the eastern coyote. I remember last summer watching a pair consume an astounding number of mice on a trip across a field. This one must have eaten all or parts of a dozen apples before she eventually ducked behind a hedge and disappeared.
We’re glad to have her around the house at this time of year because the mice will soon mount their annual invasion, and we can use all the help we can get.
The Allegory of Sarah the Squirrel
September 11, 2008
She burst into our consciousness a week ago when she chased my wife out of the garage. This splendid, feisty gray squirrel announced that she had taken over our garage, and that was it. The cottage roof slopes down close to the heads of passers-by, and there Sarah would perch, just out of reach, chattering her personal brand of trash talk at anyone who came near.
My wife was flat-out afraid of her. The first time Sarah chattered in her ear I heard this high-pitched “ERK!” from Bet and the sound of scurrying feet. Bet’s, not the squirrel’s.
Janice, our neighbour, chimed in. “You guys must have really done something to make a squirrel that mad at you!”
As long as one was in a safe place, Sarah was a lot of fun to watch. She’d patrol the ridgepole of the garage, scolding merrily, then either duck down into the hedge at the front or launch herself in a grand leap to a branch of the ash tree nearby. Then away she’d go, only to reappear from somewhere else a couple of minutes later.
My wife declared war, so I brought a box trap from the farm, along with a half-dozen fresh walnuts for bait. Five minutes later I heard a “snap” in the garage, so I opened up to find no squirrel, just five remaining walnuts and a sprung Have-a-Hart. As I was coming out of the garage after resetting it, Sarah lit into me with the worst tongue-lashing I have ever received. She seemed almost to be gloating about how easy it had been to fool me as she crouched there on the edge of the roof, just out of arm’s reach, daring me to just try it, Buster.
In defeat, but rather admiring my opponent, I retreated to the house for the evening.
In the morning I checked the trap. Three walnuts remained and the trap was sprung again. Sarah heard me and soon leaped from the hedge to her pulpit on the roof and started in anew. Gritting my teeth, I reset the thing and placed a plastic gas can at one end to complicate things.
Nothing happened for the rest of the day, but every time I stuck my head in through the side door of the garage I’d see Sarah ducking out through the slight gap between the overhead door and the concrete. I think she was trying to figure out how the gas can was part of the trap.
This morning when I checked, the gas can had been shoved aside, the nuts were all gone, and a disgusted Sarah was in the trap. I guess she had moved the can and carefully hauled the walnuts away, but then couldn’t stand thinking there might be another she had missed, so she went back and looked under that funny trapdoor in the middle.
Last week Roz had brought me a book entitled Outwitting Squirrels, by Bill Adler Jr. He suggests treating squirrels like chickens. “There’s no chicken recipe which won’t work for squirrel.” Yeah, but… This is a really pretty squirrel, and she’s as funny as all get out, as long as she doesn’t get into a position where she can do real damage. I put a blanket over the cage and loaded her into the back of my truck for a trip to the farm. I know you’re not supposed to do that, but I kinda liked her, okay?
When I removed the blanket in the woodlot and opened the cage door, Sarah went out of there and up a maple tree in one continuous motion. She hid behind the tree for a few seconds, but then, true to form, she popped around and scolded me again.
But the vast canopy beckoned, and the last I saw of Sarah she was doing a Tarzan across the tops of the maples, striking a beeline for the grove of walnuts I thought I’d avoid by taking her to the northwestern corner of the woodlot. Yeah, right. I’ll keep an eye out for her when I’m hunting: “Don’t shoot the one that comes down the tree and yells at you.” You’ve gotta admire her spirit, but I’m glad she’s no longer in control of our garage.
UPDATE Sept 13: And now she’s brought her family into this. One of her half-grown kits (?) has just joined Sarah in the woodlot by way of the Have-A-Hart. Her name is Bristol. I must be nuts!
the Walnut Diary 