Saturday, July 04, 2009, 22:15
Snake in the Grass
As soon as I came around the house Saturday morning while I was busy taking the horses and puttering around the the yard, I knew that the kitties had caught something.
Four cats sat in a circle in the shade by the pine tree growing a few feet from the driveway. And when cats are sitting in a circle staring at the the ground, I know it does not mean anything good for some small creature.
I walked down the hill.
"What have you got?" I asked.
The cats all looked up at me briefly and then went back to staring at the small black and striped yellow garter snake lying in their midst.
"You guys," I said. "Shame on you."
I will be the first one to admit that I am not especially fond of snakes. It's like an elderly neighbor of ours used to say, "It's not so much the snake as it is the coming upon them suddenly."
But I also know that snakes mean we have a healthy environment. When I was a kid, there were a ton of snakes around. Our old farm dog, Needles, used to love to ride on the hay wagon. He would watch each bale as it came out of the chute on the baler, checking to see if there was a snake sticking out of the bale. If there was, he would grab it and pull it out and shake it until it was dead and drop it off the side of the wagon. He would do the same thing when we unloaded hay.
Obviously we had enough snakes around at that time to make it worthwhile for Needles to undertake what he considered to be a very serious job. But in spite of his efforts, he never seemed to make much of a dent in the snake population.
Even when we moved back here 14 years ago, I used to see a lot more snakes than I have in recent years. In the past six years, since we've been in a drought, I have seen three snakes. One on each side of the hayfield, and one of those cute little green snakes this spring out in the hayfield. We used to have garter snakes around the house, and occasionally, we would see some very large bull snakes (or pine snakes) either in the lawn, sunning themselves in the road or down by the barn. The experts say you can tell a bull snake from a pine snake by the number of scales on the underside of the tip of the tail, but I was never interested in getting close enough to count the scales on the underside of the tail. We also had tons of those cute little bright green snakes.
But, as I said, in recent years, snakes have been extremely rare around here.
As I stood looking down at the little garter snake, Randy came around the corner of the house.
"What's up?" he said.
"The kitties caught a garter snake," I said.
Randy came down the hill toward us.
"Could we pick it up and put it somewhere so it can be safe?" I said.
I didn't see any reason for the kitties to worry at the little guy until they killed him. He hadn't done anything wrong to deserve that. And he would certainly be happier to be away from the kitty cats.
Randy found a stick, and then while the garter snake curled up defensively, Randy picked him up with the stick and gently set him down in the tall grass on the other side of the driveway.
"He'll have a better chance of getting away in the tall grass," he said.
In the meantime, the kitties were snooping around, looking for a snake. A minute or two later, they decided he had pulled a vanishing act and wandered off to find something else to do.
Small creatures likes birds, snakes, frogs, honey bees, bumble bees, bats and butterflies are all indicators that our environment is healthy. But all of them have been on the decline in recent years. This year I think we have one pair of nesting barn swallows in the barn. In other years before this we have had a dozen nesting pairs.
As I said, I will be the first one to admit I am not a fan of snakes. But I hope I start to see more of them around. And honey bees, bumble bees, bats and butterflies, too. I don't see frogs, as a rule, but in the spring, we can hear spring peepers singing from the marsh a half mile away. This year the marsh was disturbingly quiet. So I am also hoping for more frogs.
After all, if the environment is hostile to small creatures like birds, bats, honey bees, bumble bees, butterflies and frogs, there's not much hope for all of us bigger creatures, either. And it's only a matter of a time until we succumb too.
LeAnn R. Ralph
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Friday, July 03, 2009, 07:10
Finally
The other day, we finally caught one of the raccoons in the live trap that we purchased about a month ago.
I decided it had come to the final straw one night when I went down to the barn to check on the horses and to give the kitties a little more to eat. As soon as I put out the kitty food, the raccoon came, as if he were waiting for me, and then growled at me when I tried to chase him away.
I had put kitty food on the shelf in the barn, and I had made it only as far as the tractor when I heard a funny sound. I looked toward the kitty food shelf, and Little Sister was in the process of doing a backward somersault to get away from the raccoon that had climbed up on the shelf and was only a few inches from her. It was fascinating to watch Little Sister's evasive maneuver.
Of course, seeing as Little Sister has kittens in the barn, as soon as she landed from her backward somersault, she looked at the raccoon with daggers in her eyes.
It's amazing what I can see down in the barn with the solar light Randy gave me for Christmas. That thing is just the cat's meow -- so to speak.
I hurried back toward the kitty shelf, thinking the raccoon would leave quickly when he saw me. Instead, he reluctantly climbed down from the shelf and then retreated under the wall into the lean-to, looking out at me and growling softly. I grabbed a breast collar that was hanging there and banged it against the wall as hard as I could to scare him away. Kajun tore out of the barn, post haste, forgetting all about his treat of grain. The kittens and Little Sister were scared, too.
Not the raccoon. In all, I chased him off three times that night, and each time he growled at me.
Anyway, contrary to what the live trap manufacturers would have you believe, it is not that easy to catch a raccoon in a live trap.
The very first night we had the trap, Randy baited it with peanut butter and jelly and put it out by the bird feeder in the east side yard. We then retreated to the bedroom to watch out the window. It was only a matter of minutes before the raccoon appeared.
I could hardly believe it was going to be that easy.
As it turned out, it wasn't.
The raccoon, instead of going into the live trap, merely reached through the side of the cage, swiped at the peanut butter and jelly with his paw, pulled it out and licked it off. He kept it up until he had cleaned up all of the PB&J.
Randy put more peanut butter and jelly in the trap, and then we retreated to the bedroom window again. Randy brought out his big spotlight this time, and as soon as the raccoon appeared, he shined the spotlight on him.
You could tell the light made the raccoon nervous, and soon he scurried off into the brush.
He came back after that -- to get up in the bird feeder but not to eat the peanut butter and jelly in the live trap. I think the light spooked him away from the live trap. Too bad the same wasn't true for my bird feeder!
It was while we were contemplating how else to bait the trap or where else to put it when the raccoon growled and hissed at me in the barn. At one point, we were considering baiting the trap with bird seed, seeing as the raccoons like bird seed so well, but then Randy decided that a black bear with his head in a live trap was a little more than he wanted to deal with. We do have bears around here, and I agreed that a bear with his head stuck in the live trap might not be the best situation. It would provide plenty of blog material, of course, but I'd rather do without the bear in the live trap.
We decided then that the path to the barn in the west side yard would be the best place for the live trap.
Unfortunately, the same thing happened. The raccoon reached through the cage to get the peanut butter and jelly but would not go inside the live trap.
Then one day I got the idea of putting duct tape around the end of the trap so the raccoon couldn't reach into it. Randy duct taped the trap that evening.
And by morning, the raccoon was caught in the live trap.
Randy took him to a wooded area a ways away where there are no houses and let him loose. He said the raccoon did not need any encouragement to leave as soon as the cage door was open.
That's not all of the raccoons around here, by any means. There's still the huge one I've seen in the bird feeder a few times. That one is much more wary, though, and scampers off at the first sign of a human.
But, we shall see. Now that the live trap has duct tape on it, catching another one might not take so long.
LeAnn R. Ralph
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