It turned out that I had not been quite careful enough not to imprison anybody. Desperate scrabbling sounds were heard. Back up the stepladder. Off with the panel, ducking my head.
It would have been nice if, as soon as I opened up again, the desperate scrabbling had turned into a desperate bid for freedom; even clawmarks on my scalp would have been a small price to pay, I think, for knowing we were done. But no action. I could see a squirrel cowering in what I called the "back room". Or rather I could see part of it. It was behind a sort of roof rafter and I don't think it knew that its tail was showing.
Common sense said that it was more likely to come out and let me finish if it was not being watched. On the other hand, I had to keep an eye on things if I wanted to avoid closing up prematurely again. I kept my distance and tried to be watchful but non-threatening.
At one point, losing patience, I got back up there and reached in with a stick to tickle the tail, thinking maybe I could scare it into fleeing. Of course this just caused it to pull the tail up and out of sight, making it even harder to keep an eye on things.
We began to consider ways of driving it out. My wife remembered a little vial of peppermint oil that a neighbor had given us once as a mouse repellent. A rodent is a rodent, right? I impregnated a fairly large number of paper towels with the stuff, put them in the squirrel house, and waited some more. No action. I put the panel back in place to keep the fumes from dissipating. At this point you could smell peppermint in the second-floor bathroom. Now what?
A Salt Hygrometer
19 hours ago
29 comments:
Does the peppermint oil work against mice? Our house is always invaded by mice at this time of the year.
Oddly, I don't believe we ever tried it. We do sometimes have mice, and when it has gotten bad enough we have used non-lethal traps. Now that we have this cat it is unlikely that we will ever be bothered by mice again.
empty, you seem to be doing foundational research on squirrel control, but based primarily on "humane" intuitions. Like the kind of student that makes mathematical physics professors run for cover, the kind that reads about the "twin paradox", decides that this is inacceptable and sets out to prove that special relativity is inconsistent.
Surely there are traditions for dealing firmly with squirrels in houses? Surely not all traditions amount to killing them off? Or I am now witness, at your blog, to a tradition in the making, namely "one damn humane thing after another, from now until eternity"? Of course it may be that you're just having fun doing this hands-on research, and don't want an Endlösung.
I occasionally wonder why so many people are fascinated by the idea of "contacting aliens". As if we weren't already confronted on earth with enough forms of life that we don't know how to deal with. And all these people can think up in the way of "contact" is establishing whether the aliens know about primes. Yet the squirrels may be far beyond that. What looks like nesting behavior, and sounds like scrabbling insides the walls, are perhaps attempts to establish the Riemann hypothesis.
As this "other squirrel story" unfolded there was a sense of a never-ending one damn thing after another, but in fact it ended in victory for the (humanely inclined) humans.
I have fun painting myself as a victim of my humane impulses, and I have a slightly different kind of fun painting myself as a bumbler.
I have no doubt that if we had really tried we could have found many suggestions on the internet for humane ways of dealing with squirrel problems.
Even with insects and the like, my impulse is live and let live. But I recently had to deal with some burrowing wasps; they had stung someone already, and I thought it would be irresponsible on my part to leave them there (in the garden near the door). I was reluctant to use poison, and I went online looking for alternatives. I saw some ideas about ways to trap wasps without killing them. Conceivably I might have tried something like that, but then I noticed that the site I was looking at basically said if it's an underground nest you're dealing with then there's no humane way.
I went and bought a fearsome-looking spray-can at Home Depot. It hurt me to use it.
Maybe some day I'll tell my other wasp story, which is another of those bumbling+humane+victorious tales.
Back when I worked at a mental health facility we used to get bats on the ward that would come down from the attic (bats in the belfry, as it were) and fly around the day room at night. When this happened we would telephone the other wards in the building and everyone would converge with brooms and sheets. The bat would be knocked out of the air with the brooms, scooped up in a sheet (don't forget they might very well have been rabid to come close to people like that, and we were only being paid $2.02 an hour to come up with these ideas) then we would leave the unfortunate stunned critters outside to find more remote habitats for themselves.
I have occasionally had to deal with a bat in the house.
If they're flying I generally just watch them fly and wonder when they will stop. One time I managed to close a door to confine a bat to one room, so that in the morning when I came looking for it it was not hard to find. In fact it was sleeping in a little wastebasket, which made it very easy to move it outside.
Many years ago I found a sleeping bat hanging on an interior wall. I collected it in a cardboard box and kept it for a few hours, using a piece of window screening as a cover. My son, age 3 or 4 at the time, was attending a preschool right down the street, so I carried the bat down the hill to show the other kids. The teachers seemed a little put off. Also, while I was carrying it, for some reason the bat awoke in a bad state of mind and produced some very surprising and unpleasant high-pitched screeching noises. (I hadn't known that they could do that. Echolocation, yes, but this wasn't that.)
My ex-wife told the story of how her cat once caught a bat in the house. She (the cat) wanted to show it or give it someone. The only available human at that moment, who was the most un-animal-friendly of the whole large household, was sitting on his bedroom floor sorting some papers. The cat walked in and proudly deposited the still-flapping, still-bleeding creature right on top his work. That time it was the human who screeched, I believe.
Although I wouldn't want that to happen to me, I do hope that some day our cat Nika will get to hunt a bat. I don't think I can imagine anything that would give her more pleasure. We have had her for a few months. We don't let her outside. She watches squirrels and birds through various windows with rapt attention. She has caught a few mice, but this cat was born to hunt flying prey: you should see her jump.
Essential oil lore recommends using peppermint oil to repel mice and other small rodents, so I soaked some cotton balls with the stuff and put them by the entry holes.
The cotton balls disappeared.
A year later I found them in an unused closet, clearly a mouse nest.
("put out", not "put off", is what I meant)
I am not surprised somehow about the mice. Very funny.
The site plan of the cabin in the mountains, built by my late father-in-law, would have been very different had it not been based on leaving an anthill undisturbed. It's still there, the anthill, fifty years later.
Don't forget that bats eat mosquitos and are, therefore, our friends.
I love the anthill story. Is it a very big anthill?
There was a lot of talk about native and non-native ants in some earlier thread here.
Yes, bats are our much-maligned friends. Spiders are maybe not quite so much maligned: I believe that in many folk traditions it wrong or at least unlucky to kill them. I never deliberately kill spiders, but when they become numerous enough to bother people I will move them to the great outdoors.
My son has even objected to killing mosquitos.
We had a sad story with some bees that decided to nest under some roof tiles just by the front door. Could not remain there and we asked a beekeeper if there was some way to coax them out and relocate them, for which we would happily pay. But as the tiles could not reasonably come off, he said there was nothing to be done but buy the big spray can, like empty, and zap them.
With the crisis in bees in Europe (worldwide?) we hated to do it, but it was them or us....
It's not huge, no. It's about three feet in diameter and a couple of feet high. He was a gruff old soldier, my father-in-law; an engineer. He said they've been there longer than we have.
Your son is an okay person. I do kill mosquitos, but (not being very caught up in the moral argument) I sometimes worry that I might be killing a really, really nice mosquito.
The thing about mosquitos is that they occasionally carry horrible diseases: both Eastern Equine Encephalitis and West Nile virus have shown up in our area in recent years. So it was not easy when the boy's principles kicked in one day during a long car ride involving four humans and one mosquito.
Years before that there was the day the same tenderhearted boy caught on to the fact that my plan for feeding him and me a delicious dinner involved some clams dying right there in the pan with the onions and everything. He so couldn't stand the idea that in the end I agreed to go set the clams free -- we dropped them in the estuary and told them good luck.
Years later (about a year ago) he became a vegan. We respect his choice, but it ain't easy -- and it's hard to fatten him up.
Wow, good for him. If he hasn't already done so he might like (Princeton philosopher) Peter Singer's book, Animal Rights, although I'm sure the vegan movement has moved on since that was published. There's a law professor at Rutgers called Gary Francione who has written several books about animal rights and animal ownership, to be found at www.animal-law.org
Maybe he's too young to worry about the moral side of it, though. My daughter just knows it's got to be wrong to kill animals. She hasn't yet given up meat (she's got some allergies that make it hard), but I know it's only a question of time.
Um, is the squirrel still there?
Oh, no, there wasn't much more to the story. I guess the essential oil worked. Anyway, he left and I closed it up.
Funny you should mention Peter Singer. He gave a talk at the boy's school this past week, a useful talk perhaps for a group of brainy kids who like to play with ideas.
I'm so impressed with our son's calm explanations of his veganism... no preaching or self-righteousness.
(Empty's wife... hmmm... there is a Jack Sprat and his wife aspect here... so perhaps I'm "Full"?)
Anyway, he left and I closed it up.
All's well that ends well.
I've heard that Peace Corps volunteers are all vegetarians.
This is just the sort of young man I'm hoping our daughter will marry (and therefore probably won't). Is he half-full or half-empty?
Well, of course he's a lot like me and he's a lot like his mother and he's very different from both of his. For example, where does he get that stubborn know-it-all streak? Oh, right, I just remembered, we're both like that, too, in our very different ways.
He is indeed a fine young man, or old boy, or something, even if some of his behavior is intensely irritating to his parents. I believe he is much admired.
I can't imagine what sort of person he will settle down with. As you suggest, that's not up to us parents, is it?
Both of us.
Goodness, empty; can't you the blogger edit your own comments with this blogging company? Or is it a matter of principle, do not tamper with history?
I have happily edited my posts, but I have not found a way to edit comments. I should try harder to figure out how. Maybe there is a way.
Apparently there isn't.
I enjoyed very much reading this comment thread!
And of course there's a way to edit (or erase) comments here in blogger, like I just did with my previous misspelled comment.
I enjoyed rereading it. It's funny to read one's own comments. i said that I'm not very caught up in the moral argument (of killing animals & insects); why did I say that, I wonder?
It's interesting to hear about your son not being too preachy or self-righteous about being a vegan. How does your daughter feel about it? The other day, my daughter (who is sixteen) and I were considering vegetarianism as a possibility. We've never discussed becoming vegans; although it's more logical it seems like it would be much harder to do.
I feel exactly the same about vegetarianism, AJP. We're so carnivorous down her...
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