(11/24/2009) When Noah built the ark and sailed to Mount Ararat, he took people and the animals, including the wild ones, to safety. It didn’t take much coaxing to get all onboard. They all rushed in.
Things haven’t changed all that much in the many millennia between then and now. Last week we had a flood and lots of animals sought higher ground — many sought higher ground in my house. A deer bedded down in the yard, raccoons noisily decided to re-enter the chimney, and opossums decided to re-enter the basement, where chipmunks had already settled down for a long night’s sleep.
Meanwhile, all night long I could hear mice gnawing on wooden studs between the inner and outer walls, not to mention squirrels scurrying in the attic. Come winter, my house is a zoo.
Noah innocently gave rise to what we today call nuisance wildlife. Whether you live in the city, suburbs, or exurbs, there’s a host of wild creatures ready and able to share your house and its belongings.
I don’t know of anyone locally who hasn’t entertained a bat or two over his or her lifetime, or had a run-in with an opossum or a raccoon, or entertained a white-footed mouse on the kitchen counter. The ranks of these interlopers have grown to such prodigious numbers that a cadre of workers has arisen to deal with them. They are called nuisance trappers, and there are a lot of them around.
These would-be tenants don’t sport tick collars and haven’t been treated with Frontline. We provide them with quarters and they, in turn, provide sleeping and feeding spots for a coterie of parasitic arthropods, ticks, fleas, lice, roundworms, and others, some of which are pathogenic to humans and their pets.
Consequently, if you are one of those second-home owners who are not around during the winter months to watch over your house, it is a good time to act to seal up all the holes and other accesses through which such pests can get into your residence in your absence.
I don’t mind the deer, as long as they stay outdoors. I don’t mind the Carolina wren that occasionally pops into the porch through an open window and starts singing. I would like to have a turkey or two come around and scratch in the yard for this and that.
Norway rats are another matter. If you feed birds and some of the birdseed gets to the ground, a rat or two will invariably find out and join the menagerie. Voles, moles, and shrews are active throughout the winter, but they remain outside, most generally in tunnels beneath the frost layer, under piles of snow or in compost piles.
Almost all warm-blooded mammals are heat-seeking at times. And even though our local mammals sport fur coats to this or that extent, many wouldn’t mind being ensconced in a cozy nook next to the fireplace or furnace if given the chance.
In fall, when I start up my hot-air oil burner furnace, it is not unusual for the unpleasant odor of burning hair to waft up through the living-room floor grate, a sign that a squirrel or mouse has entered the wrong orifice.
Now is the time to cap that chimney and screen that dryer vent. Otherwise, you will have non-human visitors sooner or later, and they may well turn out to be unwanted.
Nuisance trappers provide a necessary service and generally do a good job. But a raccoon, opossum, or squirrel used to living indoors, once trapped and let go miles away, will try to find another indoor spot close to the point of release. Thus it is not unusual, say, for an opossum trapped in a Montauk house and released in Wainscott to find a house for the taking in that new location just as cozy and inviting. In human parlance it’s called sleeping around.