6 posts tagged “wildlife”
Saturday night, Hubbicula came running up the basement stairs and gasped: "We have a Code 5 Bun in the Window Well Alert."
I swear, he sounded as excited as a kid getting a Nintendo 64 for Christmas. The thing is, I'm a bit jaded on the teeny bun front, but that all happened while he was still in Utah. So this was his first teeny bun encounter.
In retrospect, I kinda wish I'd made Hubbicula capture the bun, because I'm such an old hand at it, he probably didn't get the full excitement out of it that capturing your first teeny bun produces. Ah well. At any rate, at least this time I had a witness for the madness.
The strange thing: this teeny bun doesn't seem particular uneasy about being in my bathtub or being filmed. It makes me wonder if we haven't already met...how fast do buns grow? Could this be the very teeny bun I captured during the summer, now grown to teenage bun size? Experts, please weigh in.
Are you fucking KIDDING me?
After all my adventures last night, I get up this morning, and go out on the screen porch to enjoy my coffee. From the window well I hear an all too familiar dry leaf rustling sound. I look and over, yes, there's a teeny bun in the window well. Only I know it ain't my teeny bun, because he's still in the bathtub, enjoying his breakfast in bed:
Please meet Not-So-Teeny Bun. He's more like Teenage Bun and just as wily. Capturing him to remove from the window well was a bit more exciting, because he actually jumped in the window and ran around the basement.
Oy. Now I've got to figure out what to do with them, because if I just put them back outside, I envision having to fish them out of the window well every other day. Suggestions?
You'll notice that this was posted at the bizarre hour of 4:00 am. Normally I would be asleep at this hour, but about 30 minutes ago, I was woken by a strange thumping noise. I rolled over, felt around myself and found both the cats sleeping. Not a cat. I got up and checked on Teeny Bun. To my relief I found him asleep, having eaten his fill of the Redzilla Guest House Salad Bar--fresh picked dandelion greens, clover, and lettuce. So I walked the house for a while until I heard a suspicious scuttling, scraping sound outside my office window.
Suddenly I remembered a possible source for the thumping: the brick I had placed on top of the sump pump well cover to block the raccoon-made hole and to weight it down. I grabbed a flashlight and ran outside. Around back, at the east* sump pump, what did I find?
A fucking raccoon, trying to get the cover off the sump pump well. Yes, a raccoon who wanted to make the eleven foot fall to NOTHING but the bottom of a pit. Grendel's mother? Another daredevil moron? Or the same? No way to know.
At any rate, I yelled at her and after a few moments of hesitation, she darted up the stairwell roof, over the garage, and away. I put the cover more firmly on the sump well and piled two big limestone rocks on top of it.
Jumping Christ on a Pogo Stick, what the fuck do those raccoons think is in the bottom of my sump well? There is, as far as I know, and according to my plumber, nothing at the bottom of the well except mud, a ceramic tile, a brand new sump pump, and about three inches of water. Did Grendel's grandpa leave a treasure map showing where all the loot from his days of banditry is buried and it's under my sump well? Did Grendel's mother accidentally drop her wedding ring down there? Does the sump well contain an entrance to Raccoon Paradise?
All I know is--I'm done. This weekend I am building an elaborate, heavy, critter-proof cover for my sump pump wells, possibly with a raccoon trap/alarm/deterrent that is not a rudely awakened me, shouting and waving a flashlight. Because I've had it with that shit. Another raccoon falls into my sump pump well and I'm going to go all Tony Montana on his ass.
Late Breaking Stupidity!!
Just as I was trying to go back to sleep, my phone rang, incoming text message. There was an off-chance it was Hubbicula, so I got up and checked it. It was an official "Campus Alert" from the university, telling me to use caution on campus, because a university student had been found dead...off campus. It also gave the name of the suspect in the case: Adolfo Garcia. Because that's the kind of shit I want to be notified of at 4:30 in the morning, after I've been out frolicking around fighting evil raccoons. Plus, I'm sorry, but this has all gone toooo far. Sure, in the case of the Virginia Tech shootings, where shootings were reported on campus, these cell phone alert systems are good.
They're not good when they're used to report on a single murder that happened off campus. They're not good when used to panic people at 4:30 in the morning. Hello! I was already using caution by trying to be safely asleep in bed! Really, what could possibly be the benefit of this particular alert? Thousands of university students, faculty, and staff woken from sleep to what purpose? Lie awake and worry? Check that their guns are loaded? (Ha! Not in cuddly, liberal Lawrence.) Check that their doors are locked?
There's no indication this is anything but a single murder. No suggestion that this guy is on a killing spree. Certainly no likelihood that he's on campus menacing students, who aren't even on campus at 4:30 in the morning, on a freaking national holiday. So, there you have it: university administrators as stupid as my raccoons.
Or, the Dumbest Little Bunny in Kansas. Yup, guess who was in my window well when I got home from work. Not Angelina Jolie.
Teeny Bun strikes again. The good news: I'm getting better at wrangling him into a cardboard box. The bad news: I am tired of this shit.
Apparently.
The cats alerted me to my new charge by meowing frantically out on the screen porch. When I went out, I expected to see a bird, or another cat, or Teeny Bun, who was most recently seen skulking around the pampas grass.
Yes, it was Teeny Bun, and he'd gone in for the latest trend: falling into one of the many deep pits around my house.
So, down to the basement I go to find Teeny Bun hiding out in the same place Baby Boid did last year, when he fell into the window well. Christ on a crutch.
Unlike Baby Boid, I didn't figure that Teeny Bun's Mom was going to come and feed him, and he does look like he's awfully small to be on his own. Either way, he wasn't going to fly out of my window well, sooo...Redzilla to the rescue.
Tragically, there was no one to film the adventure that was me entrapping this impossibly small rabbit in a cardboard box. You'll have to settle for a video of the rabbit-cat interaction.
Because it's been several days that I've seen him on his own, looking lost, and because the window well is deep, I figured I better bring him in and at least make sure that he's hydrated and not injured.
I did not bring him in just so I could look at his teeny-tiny-ness. I did NOT! Okay, fine, I put him in my bathtub with some water and some lettuce out of my garden in hopes that in a little bit I'll be able to go look at his cuteness. Satisfied?
I set out for my evening walk intending to come home and blog about a new study on the health benefits of milk chocolate. I was going to come home and crow gleefully to all you Dark Chocoladytes. You can keep your ol' heart benefits. The Milk Chocoladytes get increased brain function. So there!
But something happened on my evening walk. I saw a thing I'd never seen before--a thing I'd never imagined: two squirrels locked in mortal combat. This wasn't your typical squirrel altercation, with the running and barking and brief tussling. This was two squirrels melded into a churning ball of red-brown fur, with two thrashing tails like spastic appendages protruding from the mass. They were so caught up in the fight that they were lying in the middle of the street, and when I approached them, they didn't even pause. From a foot or so away--in retrospect that doesn't seem like a good idea--I saw that one of the squirrels was quite a bit smaller, and he was clearly getting the worst of it. He was covered in blood, with a gash on his back, an ear ripped off, and one of his eye sockets empty. As I said, no mere squirrel spat this.
I dashed up into a nearby lawn to retrieve a fallen tree branch, stepping in dog shit along the way. With the branch, I forcibly separated the squirrels. The smaller squirrel, Spiffy, darted away, trying to escape, but his larger archnemesis, Nutkin, gave chase. They grappled again. Again I separated them. If I were a bit truer to my hillbilly forebearers, I would have simply knocked both squirrels in the head, and gone home to fix myself a nice squirrel dinner. However, my liberal arts education has watered down that instinct.
Half a dozen times I separated them, but the last time, it was the small squirrel who went after the larger one. He sank his teeth into Nutkin's neck, and there was a great squealing and a spurt of blood. At last, Nutkin lay vanquished. I nudged him with the stick. Dead. Quite dead.
With his sides heaving, the little squirrel finally looked at me, made eye contact, as though to say, "Yeah, I killed him. What are you going to do about it?" To which I answered, "Touché, Monsieur Spiffy." Circle of Life. I walked on, but took the stick with me, in case Spiffy decided to follow me and take care of the only witness to his crime.
Although I write fiction, dear reader, this is all true. Including the part about the milk chocolate.
