Critters

In Southern California, we had tree rats that ate our oranges and tomatoes, scurrying through the trees to their next snack and out of our reach.  We learned to live with them since I didn’t want to use poison and we had minimal success with traps.  We had more oranges than we could use and I learned to plant extra tomatoes to make up for their theft.  We also had an occasional gopher, especially in the front yard.  I had read somewhere that shoving Juicyfruit gum into their hole would keep them away since they would eat the gum and it would mess with their digestion.  I’ll never forget the day that my neighbor Jean drove by as I was shoving Juicyfruit into a gopher hole and she stopped to chat – and how loudly she laughed when I explained to her what I was doing.  As you might guess, the gum didn’t work and we learned to live with gophers too since there really weren’t too many.  
Living peacefully with the critters around us seemed to work for us.  Until we moved to Oregon.
Our property and especially our field are besieged by gophers and moles that are so destructive, so pervasive that at one point our field looked like it had chicken pox .  They leave the lavender alone for the most part, but they create giant,, ankle-turning holes that every time I  fill in, are there again the very next day. Learning my lesson about my capability as a gopher hunter, we resorted to calling the local gopher guy whose expert trapping abilities helped reduce the gopher population pretty significantly.  Moles on the other hand…  The gopher guy doesn’t do moles so we’ve had to try other methods.  I’ve sprinkled mole deterrent around our field (a mix of castor oil and a bunch of really smelly natural ingredients) and although our field doesn’t smell much like lavender for a week or so after, our mole population has so far been reduced.
So we’ve got the gophers and moles pretty much under control.  But the squirrels?  It’s still a battle.
Their increased population is really my own fault I’ll admit.  We wanted to encourage the bird population on our property to help with insect control, so we set up several bird feeders that we keep filled throughout the year.  And it has worked.  We have attracted all kinds of birds: jays, robins, bluebirds, starlings, doves, northern flickers, and a family of quail that live under our blackberry bushes and scurry around our yard.   I love sitting at the dining room table in the morning for a front seat to all the bird drama.  A little bird lands on the feeder…a bigger bird comes along and scares the little bird away.  The little bird goes underneath the feeder and watches for the inevitable clumsiness of the big bird to shower him with bird seed.  It’s a constant coming and going of birds.  A few years ago though I noticed another visitor to our bird feeders: squirrels.  I’ve always thought squirrels were cute and I was happy to help feed local wildlife. And I loved watching them scurry up the pole to get some of the food.  
Until things got out of hand. With our support, pretty soon our squirrel population had ballooned.  Babies running around everywhere. We had to do something!  I read that adding Cayenne pepper to the bird seed irritated squirrels but not birds and would keep the squirrels away.  So I got a giant container of cayenne pepper and very liberally added it to the birdseed.  Problem solved.  No more squirrels going up the pole to get seed.  But the problem really wasn’t solved at all.   The squirrels had decided that this was a good place to hang out since there were plenty of other food sources (like my garden) and they had decided that this was home. We tried trapping and then releasing them a few miles away, but I’m pretty sure they quickly found their way back (and maybe even brought a few friends) because their population just kept increasing.
We continued trying to live with them, but one day, after surveying the stubbed remains of my lettuce crop, and then talking to a neighbor about the best way to control the ground squirrel population (an invasive species that was pushing out the native tree squirrels), I said something to my husband that he’d been waiting our whole marriage to hear:  “Honey, I need you to buy a pellet gun.”   
If you aren’t familiar with them, a pellet gun is really just a glorified bb gun, so Mark’s Christmas Story dreams were realized and he quickly bought it before I changed my mind. He took this new job seriously too, setting up target practice out in the field with a homemade target and fine tuning his scope.  After that, hunting squirrels has quickly become part of his summer afternoon ritual: he grabs his beat up, wide-brimmed hat, a beer, the pellet gun and a chair and sits on the patio in the front yard, waiting for a squirrel to make an appearance. His shooting mostly had more of a deterrent effect than population control because after a while, the squirrels knew who he was. If he was anywhere outside, they stayed hidden but as soon as he went inside, we could hear them mocking him with their incessant chirps.  Mark started keeping the pellet gun next to the door, so that if he saw a squirrel through the window, he would grab his gun, go out the back door and stealthily make his way around to the front where they all hung out.   But they acquired a sixth sense when it came to Mark and his stealthy ways and always managed to scurry under the blackberry bushes before he got to the front.  Pretty soon it escalated and Mark was taking out the screen to a few windows and cracking them open a bit so that he could commando crawl over to the window and quietly find his target. I’m really not sure that we made much of a dent in the squirrel population, but I do know that Mark enjoyed the challenge and I think we scared them enough that a good number of them found a more hospitable home.  Hopefully they won’t return any time soon.

Ah country life...