Kafka in the Country

We found Gregor Samsa scuttling about on the deck.

We fed him to the chickens.

Rumble in the Jungle

For a few nights, racoons have been coming up onto our deck and eating the dogs' food. Once they had gone so far as to come into our laundry room, but we started closing off the doggy door.

What surprised me most about the whole racoon thing was that I never heard them. Not while they were in the house, not while they were rolling the dog food bin twenty feet from where I was sleeping. Admittedly I do sleep with earplugs at night, but still. I would have thought that at the very least the dogs would have woken up, and I am normally pretty alert to the puppies who sleep right next to my bed.

Tonight the Pirate and I had stayed up kind of late to watch a James Cagney picture, then I stayed up even later to read. At a little past one something splashed in the creek. The Pirate and I looked at each other, then got up and went out to the deck to look. We could see racoons splashing in the middle of the creek, then almost immediately there was the noise of some kind of fight.

IN THIS CORNER: We have something that has the bark of a small dog, punctuated with high-pitched growls and occasional screams and yelps.

IN THIS CORNER: We have something that continually whistles like a guinea pig in distress.

The battle raged on, moving up the slope on the other side of the creek from us toward where our neighbors keep their horses. I can't believe they didn't hear it too. The Pirate fetched the paintball gun and shot into the trees and for a full two minutes all was quiet. But then it started all over again, the barking and the whistling drifting off downstream toward our neighbor's.

My first thought was "Where had they come from? Were they trying to get into the chicken coop?" I'm not so worried about that. Our chicken coop can certainly withstand the concerted efforts of racoons. Our feed barrels, on the other hand, probably cannot. But I'd rather lose feed than actual animals any day.

On the good side, puppy training is proceeding apace. They've both learned to sit, although actual housebreaking is taking longer than the Pirate would like. It's just a matter of time before they're the terror of the small-animal population!

Creating an Ecosystem

For most of my life, I've had cats. I don't particularly like cats, but the people around me do, so they're in my house. Cats catch bugs, lizards and the occasional small mammal, but mostly they kill cat kibble.

We moved to the mountains and things changed. New ecosystem. Now the cats catch moles and small snakes and bring them to us because we're obviously too lame to catch things ourselves.

Introduce chickens to the mix. The cats couldn't care less about the chickens - in fact the tom cat is obviously terrified of them. As chicks, they're sources of curiosity to the cats. I don't like to leave the tiny chicks alone with the female cat - I'm likely to lose a couple. Once they're fledged, though, they're too big to bother with.

But with the chickens came rats. Rats who first got into the feed, and then started stealing the eggs. We built our coop to be racoon-proof, but we couldn't keep the rats out without making the whole thing airtight, which just breeds germs that would hurt the chickens.

The rat problem got to be so bad that we brought in dogs. They're still puppies and learning their way around things, but dogs mean dog food sitting out all day and all night. Not just kibble, but the good wet food. With the introduction of dog food, we're now being invaded by racoons.

We have a big, racooon-proof container on the deck for the dog's kibble. This morning it had been pushed over and pushed to the edge of the deck. There's a new doggy door in our laundry room where we keep the cat food, and there were racoon prints on the floor in there. The bags of pet food under the utility sink had been ripped open.

I'm telling you, I can hardly wait until these dogs are big enough to take on a racoon. It could definitely happen. That's what they're for.

Ben Willard and the Rats of NIMH

When I was a kid, my stepmother kept a couple of white rats named Laverne and Shirley. I've heard many people say that rats are only as dirty as their surroundings, but that's just not true. It fell to me many times to clean the cage and wash the rats themselves. They hated it; it frightened them and they squeaked, their eyes bulging. They would do their best to scratch and bite me until I put them back in their cage. On the other hand, I was every bit as scared as they were. I always wore big, industrial neoprene gloves and even then was careful not to let their mouths get too near my fingers. I was thrilled when the task was over and I didn't have to touch them anymore.

People have an inborn aversion to rats. Rats are competitors - they'll take your food, and spoil what they don't take with their droppings. They harbor many diseases, and pack rats (also known as trade rats or wood rats) will not just take your food, they'll steal anything else shiny they can find.

We knew that we had rats. We had seen their holes and seen the rats themselves, but only outside the coop.

And then came the Fateful Night.

Hand-to-Hand Combat

I went down to collect the eggs and shut up the coop for the night and was disappointed to find only two eggs. My normal response to this letdown is to yell at the chickens for being so lazy.

"Come on, ladies! Quit holding out on me. I know you can do better, and for the amount you're eating, I expect a lot more from you!"

Now, we suspected for quite a while that rats were stealing the eggs, but we had no solid proof until this night. I was wearing my headlight and chanced to peek behind the nesting boxes, only to see a rat rolling an egg toward a chink in the wall.

I was OUTRAGED! I grabbed our long, skinny rake and proceeded to go after the egg, but the rat wasn't about to give it up so easily. It came charging toward me, but ducked into the space between the wall and the floor just as I was about to thump it with the rake. I retrieved the egg, but was fuming the whole time.

In order to keep the rats from stealing all the eggs, the Pirate blocked off the bottom row of nesting boxes. The chickens are now forced into a group of boxes a foot off the ground, a little harder (but by no means impossible) for the rats to get to. But instead of blocking the front off entirely, he just leaned a long piece of board against it. The chickens can't get into the nesting boxes, but the rats have now turned those bottom nesting boxes into a rat version of U-Stor-It. Every night, I go down to the chicken coop and flip back that board and every night, a few rats scurry away. There's quite a mountain of stolen chicken feed growing in one of those boxes. I'm tempted to cut up a cube of poison rat bait and add it to the box, but I'm worried the chickens might get it too.

The Tiny Gauntlet is Thrown Down

Last night the Pirate went down to put away the chickens, freeing me up for a sewing project. My concentration was utterly destroyed by shouts of a nature and volume that frightened all the horses in earshot (and that's saying something).

I ran to the deck to find out if he needed help, but he was fine. He hadn't been hurt - he'd been rushed by an intimidating crowd of rats! One came from the direction of the feeder and went for his leg. He stomped it, but stomping didn't do it, and that rat got away. As did the SIX others lurking in the lower nesting boxes.

At this point, the rats are eating every bit as much feed as the chickens, and stealing nearly half of the eggs as well. Their droppings are everywhere, including in the compost pile (it's sort of like a giant apartment building with central heating made entirely out of food).

We're getting desperate, but help is on the way. The dogs get here on Sunday.

SUNDAY! SUNDAY! SUNDAY!!!!!!