It was a Wild Critter Weekend

Besides toads and birds, we don't get too many close encounters with the wild things that wander here. This weekend brought us slightly closer than usual to two regular visitors.

Meet Critter One
It started early Saturday morning just after midnight. I woke to Ray waking me by taking hold of my feet as he stood at the end of the bed, startling me from a perfectly nice dream. He said, "I need your help. There's something in the garage." Ray is never the waker and always sleeps later than I do by one to three hours, so this unusual situation was cause for notice. Not to mention that something in the garage is generally a reason to pay attention in most any situation. My first question clarified an important distinction, "Is it a person?" and, "No, I think it's a critter of some kind." 

How bad could this be? Not a toad, not a bird, so that leaves... wait a minute. Remember those raccoon prints I saw yesterday on the garage floor in the powdery dust the electrician made when he added wiring for an additional outside light? Clearly, a raccoon had wandered in — fine — and then hid behind a box and got trapped there once the doors were down. Now that we've cleaned out nearly all the unpacked boxes and moved the cars in, it ought to be simple for two of us to locate it and chase it out. Let's go.

We go downstairs and stand ready at the door to the garage. "Let's open the garage doors, get in there, and start chasing. Ready, go...." In we go and THERE'S THE RACCOON! It's a slim, young adult, races across the floor, attempts to get away by climbing one side of the metal tracks the garage door rolls up, and as it reaches the ceiling... it jumps into the hole in the ceiling the electrician made and didn't close up, and disappears!

We both simultaneously let out a very, very long "Ooooooooh!," both sadly knowing that this situation just became very much more complicated.

We leave the garage door open about a foot and go back to bed, hoping it will make its exit, but noise a while later lets us know it isn't done with us. We raise the door to two feet, making the outside more attractive, we hope, and go back to bed. What else was there to do? Perhaps put back the things it had knocked off of shelves, or restack my hundreds of carefully size-sorted and stacked plant pots that lay in a jumbled mess across the floor? 

This is NOT our raccoon, but is as cute as ours was.

Fast forward more than 12 hours later and we've bought a humane critter trap (which coincidently happened to be on sale at the local Tractor Supply store), Ray has set it up, and I've helped place it into a tight surrounding of boxes and heavy things that keep the critter from reaching from the side through the bars to steal the cat food bait without going inside. (I've seen nice raccoons in action before when Liz's visiting cats spent the night on the front porch in a wire cage.) We go to bed, we sleep, no more noise, no disarray. Oh good. Looks like we no longer have a critter, but we have a nice trap for next time. A happy ending for all involved.


Meet Critter Two
We'd seen evidence of this bothersome second critter in our yard on several occasions, which we'd anticipated for years before even moving in, knowing it and its kin live in abundance all along the islands. This one didn't come inside, but I was about as close to it as the nice raccoon as I went out to discourage it that same morning.

Imagine the scene. It's Sunday morning and I've been sleeping a little while after the excitement of the raccoon. Suddenly, I hear a noise and jump out of bed to go chase the raccoon again. But wait, the noise is Ray in his office -- he couldn't sleep and has been trying to be quiet so I could rest. I get him to take a turn going back to bed and, knowing from experience that I won't be able to sleep again, I go into the kitchen, drink hot tea, and find things on my computer to run my eyes over. I get so tired of that nonsense that I think surely I can sleep because I can't clearly can't think. The sky is bright, but a morning nap could help get me to church, which I promised I'd do after taking the summer off. I start down the stairs and stop to look out at our slowly evolving yard. Little plants, some brown-leafed, some getting greener. The outline of a small berm of sand running alongside the interestingly-shaped beds that define their edges. The pile of noticeably grayer sand in the middle of a bed.  Wait, whaaat? And movement in the center. A critter, going down into a hole and coming back up with an armful of sand, which it pushes out into the bed. Its little brown head looks around each time it comes up, then back it goes for another load. A dreaded pocket gopher whose piles we've seen several times finally makes itself visible to our world.

We've seen the piles of sand all over the island, read about the little gophers and how annoying they are, the damage they can do eating plants, the way they can disfigure a yard. And there is ours, doing its annoying little job, almost completely covering the nice tropical milkweeds beside the hole. Wait... wasn't that particular milkweed bushier than that? Oh, little gopher has had some breakfast.

This is NOT our gopher, but is how ours looked.

I wouldn't want to hurt our critters, but I want to discourage this one. Just then, Ray gets up, so I point out the creature for his viewing pleasure, knowing he also wants to know all he can about those we share our property with. Then, as he watches, out I go and in it goes, hiding from me. (We like this reaction in our critters.) I turn on the hose and give the new tunnel a proper baptism... the water runs and runs, seemingly filling a swimming pool size void. Enough of that. Next comes a refilling of sand into the entrance and plenty of stomping, and though all of this is probably not at all anything more than an inconvenience for little gopher pal, the goal is to be annoying and discouraging. And I do thank it for the gift of the nice pile of sand to shore up the bed's border.