MICE & POSSUMS & PROBLEMS, OH MY

The funny thing is that we live in a very suburban area, between two large cities, and maybe two blocks from a freeway.  But there are still critters who find their way toward us.  Now that we are heading toward fall, too many critters seem to be headed our way.  When the weather changes toward fall and winter, wild creatures naturally start looking for shelter.  We’ve had possums in the yard and once in the garden room, and spotted foxes and even a coyote once awhile back.  

  Then, within a one-week period, we found first a small rat and two days later a large rat, very dead and neatly lain by the door going out to our garden room by our beloved cat, Max.  We of course thanked Max nicely and took the carcass to the wild area behind us, which probably surprised Max but he didn’t seem to feel unappreciated.    And then a couple of days later, 2:00am, we were awakened from a very sound sleep by a shocking noise sounding like someone had stuck a stick in our outside compressor.  We immediately leapt up, quite disoriented from the sound sleep we had been in, and after all sorts of running around, found that still another rat had managed to enter the compressor cage, climb up the center thingy, and when the fan came on, the rat met its fate, over and over and over, until we stopped the fan, at which time its carcass fell into the bottom of the cage.  A lot of money later, the carcass was removed, one bent fan blade was repaired, and we had acquired a number of devices from the hardware store designed to entice rats and then dispatch them.

Our nerves were just settling down from all of these events, when wouldn’t you know it, we found a baby dead possum in a flower bed.  Our cat may have dispatched it or it may have sampled the rat stuff, we don’t know.  But we thought it was too small to bother the Animal Control folks and too large to dispose of easily, so we had to bury it.  Shudder.

We’re into autumn, the season of mists and spiders and all that, but it appears to be also the season of lots of uninvited critters.  At least this year.