SKUNKS AGAIN!

"Scentsational"

A few nights ago, while we watched a British mystery on television, we heard a loud thud against the French doors in the living room, a sound that reminded us of the children’s book about those “things that go bump in the night.” The noise preceded an expulsion of pieces of insulation through one of the floor vents, followed by violent scratching sounds beneath the vent. We searched out a hammer and beat on the metal vent for a few minutes, and the noise subsided. A big rat? A possum? A skunk? Who knew? We live in the woods of Sewanee, Tennessee, and wildlife strolls through our yard weekly – skunks, rabbits, deer, even a fox or two at times. Also, our cottage is situated on what I call a corduroy lawn, an uneven surface beneath which live millions of moles. Yes, we enjoy a regular cast of Beatrix Potter characters that may have enchanted Beatrix, but don’t fascinate me, particularly skunks and moles.

I didn’t harbor any loving thoughts about the invader, and the following morning we called the heating/air conditioning experts who donned hazard suits and went into the crawl space, returning with the news that some critter had chewed up insulation and destroyed part of the duct work, both of which had been replaced two years ago.

“Can’t do no work until you catch the animal,” Josh said. “You need to call somebody that traps critters.” He gave us the name and number of “the wild man,” as he’s called -- a man reputed to have a recording of the music from the “Batman” movie on his answering machine. Batman wasn’t available, so we searched the telephone directory for wildlife control technicians in Winchester, Tennessee and turned up an ad about a man who claims “if it walks or crawls/ give me some calls!” He also touted that he could get rid of animals dead or alive – rats, skunks, bats, coons, even honey bees. His field of expertise is called Nuisance Wildlife Control, and technicians have to be insured, licensed, and bonded before they can trap wildlife.

The technician arrived in early afternoon wearing a t-shirt and blue jeans – no protective armor of any kind – and began inspecting the site of the air conditioner. “Yep, gets through these holes in the front of the AC,” he announced. Mind you, the holes look small enough to accommodate a baby mouse, but he insisted that critters are mostly long and skinny. “If you take off their hair, they ain’t nothing, and they can slip right through a little crack,” he said. “I think it’s a skunk, but it could be a possum or a coon. You know it ain’t a squirrel because they stay up high and get in your attic. Got any of them?” I assured him that openings under the eaves of the roof had been boarded up. “Well, I know it ain’t a bird. Now if you get some of them, they carry these mites that can get in your house and make you itch and cause all kinds of diseases.”

After leaving that bit of assurance for me to chew on, he opened the trunk of his car and brought out a large cage and a small sack. The sack held a can of sardines, a bag of marshmallows, and a can of scent. The sardines went into the cage, along with the marshmallows, and he smeared the oil from the can of sardines on the ground in front of the air conditioner. “This ought to get ‘em,” he said. “If nothing’s in the cage by Thursday, call me. If something gets in the cage, don’t go near it.  Call me. And if I don’t catch nothing, you still owe me $175.”

Last night, we did a lot of peering through a bedroom window to see if a critter had been attracted to the can of sardines, but no wildlife appeared.

Meanwhile, readers are probably asking, as I did, how do you prevent the skunk, if it is a skunk, from spraying its odorous musk when it’s caught?

It seems that the trapper approaches the trapped, blind skunk and covers the trap with a tarp or piece of burlap. In the dark trap, the skunk is less likely to target and spray the trapper. The trapper gently transports the cage to his car, and as far as I know, takes the critter to a new location or releases it alive, but, in most cases, it’s humanely destroyed because it could be carrying rabies.

Last night I heard two bumps in the night and figured that whatever is underneath the cottage is hibernating or it would have gone out for dinner; namely, the smelly sardines. I know it isn’t skunk mating season or skunk birthing season, so what’s this critter doing in the “den” beneath my house, bumping around, eating insulation, and trying to make an appearance through the floor vents? I read somewhere that skunks actually like to be close to humans, but I’m not ready for such a cozy relationship.

This morning, first thing, I ran to the window and looked down at an empty trap. I was dismayed to see the smelly sardines still nestled in the trap and no critters looking out at me. I decided to give this experiment two more days, and then we'll search for another skunk chaser. As much as I believe in peaceful co-existence, I refuse to live side by side, or floor to crawl space, with a skunk! Bring in the swat team!

Meanwhile, bears have been sighted near the student cafeteria, a block away from us. It’s time to return to Cajun Country for the winter. Down there, we just have mosquitoes, snakes, alligators, and nutria. It’ll be interesting (or devastating) to see what takes up residence in our cottage while we're away from The Mountain this winter! 

A NEW RESIDENT

Our resident wren's new home

We now have a resident wren, one that has made its home in a hanging pot containing a strawberry plant on our back porch. It’s either a Carolina Wren or a House Wren, but it darts away so swiftly that I’m unable to examine it closely. However, I know it’s a wren, and this identification of the small bird comes not from my copy of The National Audubon Society Field Guide to Birds, but from my memory of the picture of a wren in an old linen-paged book about birds my mother bought for me during pre-school years. It’s true that I could only identify cardinals, robins, blue jays, wrens, and crows after looking through this beautiful children’s book, but looking at it inspired me to deeper study of the bird kingdom. The book was eventually stolen from our van at a Motel 6 in Albuquerque, New Mexico when we were taking a load of books to my grandchildren in California back in the 80’s, but the pictures are etched in my memory. My mother loved birds and bought me my first set of binoculars, and I’ve passed on the hobby of bird watching to my youngest daughter Elizabeth who keeps binoculars and a field guide to birds on a table in her den.

After a light rain last week, I discovered potting soil scattered on the back porch and thought a deer had been foraging for the strawberries in the hanging pot, but the following morning, I saw a small, compact wren bringing a leaf to the pot and knew that it was settling in with us. She eyed me while she buried the leaf in the pot and finished her task before flying away for more nest lining. Although I’ve spied on the wren for several days, I haven’t heard the gurgling or bubbling song that wrens make during breeding season. Some sources report that the song is loud and insistent and that it’s difficult for one to believe that such a small bird can project such volume.

My friend Vickie, the consummate bird identifier, wants to take down the pot to study the nest, but I’m reluctant to disturb my short-winged friend. I think that it forages for nest material (and insects) beneath the tall hemlock in the yard as I’ve seen it moving through the tree’s lower branches during early morning.

Wordsworth wrote a lengthy poem praising the wren, but I prefer the Japanese poems about flora and fauna. Issa, one of the most renowned poets writing in the Japanese haiku tradition, penned these lines about our undaunted bird friend who’s building a home on our porch:

    “fighting the mountain wind
     on foot…
     a wren.”

I can easily envision my small friend climbing up the mountains near Sewanee, fighting the fierce winds that frequently blow through, to reach the Cumberland Plateau…and, ultimately, my back porch.

Issa, whose name means Cup-of-Tea, wrote haiku during the 19^th century and used Buddhist ideas about grace, compassion, and, in the case of our house wren, “joyful celebration of the ordinary,” wandering the Japanese countryside, composing haiku about such ordinary subjects as birds battling the elements. 

“GO FOR TURTLES”

On a recent trip to central Florida, we dipped southward to the beach near Fort Walton, and after a brief look around at deserted condos and empty beaches with sea oats swaying in the wintry wind, we turned north again toward DeFuniak Springs. We traveled on a narrow highway that led through Scrubs and stretches of ancient sand dunes dotted with scrub oaks, pines, and curious mounds I learned were the homes of gopher turtles. My intent was to stop and investigate the mounds, but we were due in central Florida that evening, so we sped across the fifteen-mile stretch of turtle habitats without making a widespread search for the actual reptile.

Gopher turtle mounds near Navarre FL

Later, when we settled in central Florida, I talked with the caretaker of Inez Sullivan, our hostess for several days, and Juanita, the caretaker, told me how her people caught gopher turtles during hard times when food was scarce in lake country. The hunters reached into a turtle hill with a long hook and simply pulled the turtle out of its hill. She claims that the success rate of catching one of the gopher turtles was 100 percent – no bait, just a hook and a croker sack to hold the catch. Sometimes the hook yielded a rattlesnake, which I assumed shared the hill habitat, and I asked the caretaker what happened when the hunter caught this reptile. “He’d run like the devil was at his heels,” she said.

I remember some of the stories my former father-in-law told about Depression Days when turtles were coveted as food. He claimed that the family would save up enough money to buy a little gasoline to run their Model T, not to make a trip, but to putt-putt through the woods and scare up turtles so that the family could have meat for supper. Juanita said that a favorite recipe among country folk was turtle meat stewed down with onions and seasonings to serve over rice.

I love turtles and believe that when they appear, they bring good fortune. A few years ago, I wrote a blog about a box turtle that appeared in my yard at Sewanee – a specimen that had the #1 marked on its shell. The following day another turtle of the same species appeared with the #2 on its shell. “Now,” I told my readers, “if a turtle with the #3 imbedded in its shell had shown up, I’d have been spooked, but these two turtle sightings completed the show.” I wasn’t tempted to stew them or to play the lottery using the numbers, but the sight of turtles with numbers for markings did give me a start.

Gopher turtles were known as “Hoover chickens” during the Great Depression, but hunting them in Florida and other southern states is now forbidden as they’re an endangered species. Developers in Florida are required to temporarily move populations when they begin development of land for subdivisions. Floridians regard the Gopher turtle highly and designated it as Florida’s state reptile.

So far, I’ve only seen the turtles’ burrows, which I’m told often reach a depth of nine feet and which protect them from coons, skunks, foxes and other predators – and, I might add, curious investigators like me.

A WORDS’ WORTH ABOUT A CROW’S WORTH

Diane's drawing of her favorite bird.

How many reams I’ve written about crows, much to the annoyance of people who regard them as public nuisances! This morning, the first relaxed morning I’ve enjoyed in the New Year, I went outdoors to look at a sea of newly-grown rye grass and above me I heard the familiar caw of my favorite bird, the crow. It perched at the top of a towering oak near the coulee, eyeing me and talking (yes, crows can even learn to speak words and short sentences more clearly than parrots!).

Crows, the most intelligent of all the birds, are reputed to be guardians of the hidden and sacred, as well as interpreters of the unknown, but if you don’t have a drop of Scots superstition in your bloodline, as I do, you probably won’t regard them as masters of mystery or messengers who remind us to pay attention to connections to our ancestors.

Despite the cold this morning, I stood awhile in the yard, clothed only in my pajamas, and made echoing caws, but the crow turned up his “nose” at my poor imitations of its birdcalls. I think it may have been trying to drive a hawk away, as crows dislike hawks and owls, but he may have been trying to convey news of what is going on in town. In Nordic mythology, the god Rodin had two crows named Hugin and Munin who went about gathering news of happenings in the world, then would fly down and sit on the god’s shoulders, informing him of what they had seen. However, the crow this morning may have been looking for plant materials to create hooks that he could use to remove grubs from old logs –crows are experienced toolmakers.

Crows hover over the Tower of London in the UK, and some people (probably Scots) believe that if they disappear from the Tower, the English monarchy will topple. According to the superstition, Beefeaters (guards of the Tower) make sure that ravens have a home in the Tower so their kingdom on this earth won’t perish.

In 2007, the skies suddenly began to rain cane toads in Australia, and when scientists investigated the cause of this phenomenon, they found that crows were the culprits. They had toppled cane toads from tree limbs, then swooped down and carried them back to the limbs to consume the insides of the reptiles. People in this remote Northern Territory of Australia seem to prefer the crows to ugly cane toads.

From my 2011 book of poetry, Alchemy, the poem “No Messages from Crows:”

The savage birds scorn Table Rock,
a long standing tower, stripped
of branch and inviting green;
perhaps the light is too extreme
above the unbroken rock,
they miss concealment and rubbish piles,
scenes of malice where they can haggle
and strut, their expressive tongues
now unable to stir the clear air,
this place free of litigation.
I miss the raucous voices,
their sleek coats glistening
in an incautious sky,
their songs raised,
the primitive incantations
of holy, unholy dark princes.

DEER FRIENDS

One of the sights at Sewanee I’ll miss when I return to Louisiana next week is that of the deer that graze in the woods behind our cottage and near our front porch in the evenings. Although they usually ruin the flower beds we plant each Spring and pluck the blueberries before we have had a chance to harvest a few from our bush, I still like to see them and even talk to them when they graze close by.

Last week when I read an article in the Sewanee Messenger about deer management and culling, I felt a twinge of guilt about my romanticizing deer visits to our “domain.” The author of the article, Leslie Lytle, reported that management studies indicate the deer herd on The Mountain must be reduced by forty percent, resulting in a harvest of 236 and in reduction of the doe/buck ratio to 3:1. She stated that from 1700-1900, excessive deer hunting almost decimated the white-tailed population in this area, but we certainly see a gracious plenty of them on The Mountain now.

Designations like “Biological K” define the number of deer an area can sustain before disease and starvation affect the deer population; while “Social K” defines how much nuisance we humans on The Mountain can tolerate before a deer cull is called for. Lytle cited destruction to gardens and landscaping (such as our small flower beds), the incidence of Lyme disease from deer ticks, and “loss of biodiversity due to excessive understory vegetation” (the small woods fronting our property) as nuisances that call for culling.

The deer population at Sewanee seems to be approaching “Biological K” and has passed the “Social K” boundaries. So the hunt is on! The archers have sharpened their arrows and begun deer culling. Already, I see less and less does and more fawns nibbling the understory in the woods and trimming my lawn.

A few days ago, as I watched a fawn lying in the woods, I felt compelled to write a few lines of poetry, and the following day I wrote another poem when a fawn moved her grazing ground closer and closer to the front porch, only a few feet away from my chair. Here are the poems:

I. THE FAWN
appears every evening, claiming her place
in a network of fern and ivy
while her mother crashes in the brush nearby;
and from the porch, we view her return
as sentiment for the thick ticking of green,
and, too, for us because we watch for her,
her round eyes aroused
when we click our tongues,
trying to woo her closer.

She is some kind of faith
in the softness of the world, resumed,
brooding in the coolness before first dark,
her heart revealed in eyes beckoning,
in the warm dust of her skin
we long to touch.

We hold her eyes until she disappears,
leaving a cup in the green spot
as her mother approaches
with her fear of death
and whisks her away,
leaving us with the whisper of leaves,
and a fragile grace filling moments behind.

II. THE FAWN
She comes closer today,
the spotted fawn shyly eating,
nibbling at the last light of day.

She looks up at me,
inching slowly toward kissing noises,
the cautious welcome she once ignored.

Nearby, the men with taut bows are culling,
perhaps her mother’s heart cruelly pierced,
vanished at the dinner hour.

And so she seeks new warmth,
her dark mouth downturned, stealing my grass,
passing into another kingdom.

She reaches the porch,
regards me with eyes of promise,
both of us encouraged, wondering

if she will reach my fanned-out hands,
breathe her sadness into them,
an abandoned, yet welcomed creature

stepping through the scattered leaves,
pausing but not looking back
to the place where her mother has fallen,

already knowing
we cannot keep each other.

BADGERED BY A SKUNK?

Last evening, as I was reading a line from Joseph Campbell, “Sri Ramakrisna says ‘Do not seek illumination/unless you seek it as a person whose hair is on fire seeks a pond,’” I was called to the kitchen window to see the illumination of something that set my hair on end – a huge skunk standing in the light of the yard lamp. Light shone into its expressionless eyes, but it went back to rooting for grubs like a pig after truffles, even when we beamed a flashlight on its body. From the direction of the hemlock in my backyard, a deer came out and observed this nocturnal beast for a few moments, and all three of us froze in a frame of territorialism, watchful against intruders.

The deer ambled past the fence, and I went out on the porch to get a closer look at the critter. Because we didn’t move around, it must have felt safe, and  it slowly undulated toward the hemlock, then disappeared under its drooping branches. To me, the animal seemed both beautiful and terrifying; the latter because years ago a skunk sprayed into a floor furnace beneath our home in Texas and also because the size of the animal in the yard was unlike that of a “regular” skunk. I thought perhaps it was a badger. However, “Pepe le Pew” presented a fluffy white tail, and, after researching the two animals, I discovered that badgers have stubby tails. At one point in this nocturnal drama, the skunk seemed to be dancing around in a frenzy.

This morning after Eucharist at St. Mary’s I asked Sister Lucy (who knows the wildlife around Sewanee) if she thought it was a badger, but she said “no” and that skunks in these parts are often as large as I described and have broad white markings on their bodies and, sometimes, a fluffy white tail.

I don’t know if I’d really like to have badgers around as they often burrow in yards and do a lot of damage. Still, when I looked at Beatrix Potter’s illustrations of a badger this morning, I really wanted to catch a glimpse of this nocturnal animal. Potter wrote a book about a badger and a fox entitled The Tale of Mr. Tod in which Tommy Brock, a badger who captures two bunnies (could my critter have been searching for the brown bunnies that brazenly graze on my lawn daily?) and puts his catch in an oven in the home of Mr. Tod, the fox who is temporarily away from his residence. When the fox returns home, he and the badger end up in a fight and roll down a hill fighting like the bad guys Potter wanted to portray.

Frederick Warne didn’t like Potter’s opening paragraph of The Tale of Mr. Tod in which she relates that she was “tired of making goody goody books about nice people” and that she’d make a book about two disagreeable people called Tommy Brock and Mr. Tod. Warne changed her opening lines to read: “I have made many books about well-behaved people.” I almost expected Potter to step out of the mountain mists during the short time my nocturnal visitor roamed the yard – the scene was surreal, with the critter waving that white tail like I’d imagine a stripper waves a big white fan, then disappearing into the overhang of the hemlock.

I guess we’re luckier than one of our friends who lives in a home perched on the bluff near Monteagle, Tennessee where a buzzard frequently visits. She says she awakened one morning and found a large black buzzard eying her through the window of her bedroom, which overlooks a wraparound deck. We told her that the big bird was probably after smaller birds that often crash against the glass panes and die on her deck, and she registered some relief that the vulture wasn’t eying her for a meal.

Although we live on the campus of the University of the South, Sewanee is a village intermingled with deep woods, and I’ve written about some of the critters that roam around campus at night in my recent book of poetry entitled Alchemy. Alchemy should be available at amazon.com within a few weeks.

CICADA SONG

Yesterday, as we drove through the deep woods along the road leading to the Templeton Library here at Sewanee, we heard loud buzzing sounds coming from the trees.  Joel, my grandson, seven, had never heard the strange sounds, so we stopped the car and our resident botanist, Vickie, took him near an old oak by the side of the road to pick a cicada from a leaf so he could hold the noisemaker.  It was a specimen for a budding entomologist (Joel loves insects and reptiles), and he examined, firsthand, the short proboscis under the strange head with red bug eyes and beautiful transparent, veined wings. 
The insect was part of the 13-year resurrection of the southern cicada from Brood XIX here in middle Tennessee. Joel seemed to be more fascinated with the cicada than any amusement attraction he had seen at Dollywood and around Gatlinburg.  Vickie showed him the noisemaker called the “tymbal” on the abdominal base of the bug and explained how the male sings loudly to attract his mate.  Cicada means "buzzer" in Latin. They are fairly benign bugs and don’t bite unless they mistake your arm for a tree root and begin to feed, so Joel was brave enough to hold the insect before releasing him to join other cicadas in the surrounding trees. 

I remember making a field trip with three biologists one hot summer in North Carolina when the 17-year cicadas emerged.  Their resurrection area was deafening when they emerged from life underground as nymphs for seventeen years, living on root juice and in their final stages before emergence, constructing an exit tunnel.  After emerging they molt, shedding their skins on a plant close by and enter the world as adults.  In the North Carolina woods, the eerie noise sounded like music announcing the end of the world, a constant, monotonous sound hynoptic in effect and crazy-making if you tune in to their static too long.

In many countries, the cicada is featured in songs, novels, and folk tales, and is regarded as a symbol of reincarnation. I have always considered them as symbolic of the resurrection even though they only live for five or six weeks.  Cicadas are also deep fried and served up in north China as a delicacy and are utilized in Chinese medicine. 

However, here in middle Tennessee, cicadas are often regarded as pests and back in 1998, millions of them invaded sidewalks, highways, and households.  Folks say they covered cars, crunched underfoot, and drowned out the strains of music at outdoor weddings with their buzzing arias. 

Meanwhile, Joel searches for them every day.  Yesterday, he brought home a specimen whose abdomen had been devoured by ants and put it in a pocket of the Honda.  When we rescued the bug that evening, he was still alive.  We placed him on a pink zinnia in the flower bed where Joel watched him closely, knowing that he would die and declaring that he’d bury him in the bed when he took his last breath.  The insect was still struggling at dusk, but we plan to have a burial service today if the birds haven’t eaten him.

DYING SOUNDS (A poem about locust songs from my chapbook, Just Passing Through):

These locust afternoons of summer,
sound murmurs in monotonous cicada cadence,
muffling any hope of nascent song.
Is this the way death sounds,
a forever evenness of one continuous note
we insects will sing without question
in awful unawareness, beating our wings,
attempting to pierce a final darkness so dense,
to serenade a quite deaf ear?

P.S.  Some critter or bird carried our cicada away during the night.  The botanist went on an early morning foray and photographed a singing male.  She said this morning’s cicada song is ear-splitting.

ARMADILLO ARRIVES WITH ADVENT OF NEW YEAR

Today, while I was sitting at my computer overlooking the backyard, I began listing my New Year’s resolutions and right smack in the middle of the process, an armadillo appeared beside the upside-down bird bath. It was 9 a.m., and he should have been asleep in the coulee, but appeared to be fully alert, rooting in the mound of leaves by the Spirea bush. He was fat and seemed to be tanking up for another month, as February frequently brings Spring to Teche country.

I tapped on the window, but he was undeterred and kept on tunneling in the leaves.

“He can’t hear,” a friend told me.

“You have his faculties confused,” I said. “Actually, he has poor eyesight and relies on his hearing and smell to help him find food.”

“Oh,” she said, “that’s right, it’s YOU who can’t hear anymore.”

Actually, I can hear many things, including a constant buzzing sound like that of locusts (which indicates some loss). “But I can also swim well like armadillos,” I defended.

She shrugged and went back to surfing The Net for more interesting activity, like how to develop “MAC apps,” whatever that means.

According to an article about Native American lore, written by Jill Stefko, armadillos symbolize boundaries. The three-banded ones are very adept at rolling into a tight ball to protect themselves. They carry their protection at all times and use it to keep their well-being intact. Rudyard Kipling immortalized the armadillo in one of his children’s stories, relating that the “little armored one” was born out of an agreement between a turtle and a hedgehog. In order to escape from a hungry Jaguar, the hedgehog taught the turtle how to curl up into a ball to protect himself, and the turtle taught the hedgehog how to act like it was more armored. So the first two armadillos that appeared on earth caused a predatory big cat to become awfully confused.

According to the article I read about armadillos, they symbolize empathy, discrimination, and groundedness. Also, when an armadillo enters your backyard, it’s time to define your space. I guess that the appearance of this animal in the New Year means it’s time for me to define my own space, especially since I have difficulty saying no.

The best story I’ve read about the armadillo concerns The Great Depression when the little animals were renamed “Hoover Hogs” because starving people hunted and ate them. During the Depression, my former father-in-law hunted these creatures from an old Model T. He saved gasoline, not to make highway trips, but to speed through the woods, car motor roaring, the noise rooting out rabbits and armadillos. The nickname, “Hoover Hog” was a criticism of President Hoover who had promised that everyone would have a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage. However, a sizable portion of the U.S. population suffered starvation and poverty instead.

Around here during the 70’s, if a person sighted an armadillo in the yard, he’d call an organization called Gulf South Research, about a mile away from my home, because scientists were using them as guinea pigs for leprosy research. Two lab technicians came and took away one in my backyard during that period, but now I just leave the big rats to their boundaries and write poetry about their activities when they appear.

Happy New Year. May an armadillo protect you during the coming year!

P.S. I purchased the facsimile of the armadillo above in Oaxaca City, Mexico. It was carved by native Zapotecans.