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Tales of Homeowning: Them friggin’ critters

“Hi, Roxy,” I said.

“Mrrroww,” replied the slim tortoiseshell cat. She sounded like a rusty hinge.

“How’s it goin’?” I asked as I took a couple of steps closer.

“Mrrroww,” she repeated, looking up at me with reproachful eyes. Take another step and I’ll run, she seemed to be saying.

I was fairly confident she wouldn’t run, not while I carried a dish of meaty cat food fresh out of the can. I walked to the back of the yard, closer to the rose bush she liked to crouch under. She danced around me as I walked, now ahead of me, now behind. I set the dish atop a gray flagstone and backed off a step or two. The cat approached the dish, gave me one last wary glance, then settled down to eat. In the background I could hear plaintive, insistent cries. I looked back at the house to see Venice, Baxter, and Scooter watching me through the kitchen windows. They also wore reproachful expressions. I sighed. Some days you can’t please anybody.

“Roxy” isn’t actually the first cat’s name; so far as I know she doesn’t have a name. It’s just what my wife started calling her ever since she first appeared about two weeks ago. This new kitty is the latest in a parade of urban animals to enter our lives in the three years we’ve lived here. Apparently, all you need to attract wildlife is a backyard. And a chimney. More about the chimney later.

I mentioned cats - oh, yes, we get cats. Perhaps six or seven different felines in our tenure here. This is how Scooter came to live with us. He just showed up, rail-thin and bedraggled. M took instant pity on him and began setting out food. Now and again at first, then every day as Scooter (M had named him by week two) returned at the proper times. Morning before we left for work, early evening as we got home. M wanted to bring him inside and into the fold before Halloween, traditionally a bad time to be an outdoor cat. I said okay. M really liked him; who was I to say no? Suddenly Venice and Baxter had a new roommate. They were less than pleased. I guess we were lucky that the resulting hostilities lasted only four or five weeks. M remembers this period being somewhat shorter, but I assure you that it wasn’t.

Parenthetical: I need to add here that I have a deep and abiding hatred for people who allow their cats to run loose. Hatred is a strong term, but there it is. The domesticated cat is not meant for the outdoors, and all kinds of terrible things can happen to a cat thus neglected. If you’re reading this and you have a feline pet, keep the cat in the fucking house. Thanks for listening. End parenthetical.

You’d expect birds and squirrels with a backyard, and you wouldn’t be disappointed at our place. We have a bird feeder hanging from the cherry tree just behind the kitchen, and a squirrel feeder on a shepherd’s crook in the very back of the yard. Actually, there isn’t a squirrel feeder up presently. The rodents have chewed through the cords by which first one feeder hung, then the other. You’d think they’d realize that they were working against their own interests (not unlike gay Republicans), but they’re just friggin’ squirrels, not grad students. You tell them and tell them and get exactly nowhere. So they try to raid the bird feeder, but can’t hang onto it - it’s designed to be unstable for just this reason. A lot of seed gets spilled to the ground when the squirrels attack it, though, which may be their actual intent. Hmmm. Maybe they are as smart as grad students.

We’ve had a couple of unfortunate experiences with squirrels. Some of them had made a comfortable home inside the soffits on either side of the house, beneath the overhang of the roof. We could hear them tumbling around up there early in the morning; it sounded like a cascade of bowling balls. The cats went nuts trying to figure where the sound was coming from. We put off doing anything about it until we had central air installed. The chief installer came down from his impossibly tall ladder and complained (genially) that there were squirrels living where he needed to run refrigerant tubing. That required me to climb a similarly tall ladder to tack up some hardware cloth as a temporary solution. Heights unnerve me. I did have the presence of mind to make certain that there were no squirrels above that soffit before I tacked up the mesh.

We get a variety of birds, many of which I can’t really identify. I certainly recognized the hummingbird that came to within a foot of my face a month ago, though. I was sitting on the back step and the whirring little thing just materialized in front of me. Perhaps five seconds passed - a long time when you’re staring into a bird’s button-black eyes - and then it flitted away. The sound of its wings, a low and constant rush, is still with me.

As pleasant as that memory is, I have less pleasant recollections of certain other birds. Grackles, for instance. They have irritating voices, they strut and preen like they own the joint, and they seem to be the moronic thrill-seekers of the avian world. I say this because grackles - and only grackles - made an annoying habit of tumbling down our uncapped chimney and into the wood stove. Fortunately, they never did this during the colder months. The sound of their scratching and fluttering in the stove never failed to excite Baxter, who would dash down the stairs and assume an expectant position before the stove. M and I would then have to lock the cats in the downstairs bathroom, cordon off the rest of the first floor with sheets (to avoid errant flights into the kitchen), open the front door and windows, then open the stove and coax the offending bird out. Sometimes this took place smoothly; sometimes the bird needed to be ushered out of the stove; sometimes the bird needed to be directed out of the house. As a result, I have no great love for grackles.

We decided at length that we needed to have the chimney properly capped, and that we should also use the opportunity to de-squirrel the roof. The company we called took care of the chimney situation expediently. The squirrels were another matter: traps would have to be left in place for several days in order to insure that no more of the animals lived up there. Only then could the holes in the soffits be closed off. The “humane trap” method offered by the company was very expensive, and we were already spending a lot of money as it was. We reluctantly decided on the non-humane (killer trap) method. I led the way on that decision, though I hoped that the soffits were by that time unoccupied and no animals would be killed. Things did not turn out so happily; two squirrels were killed. One of them while M was home sick one day. A second squirrel, killed some days later, dangled in a grisly manner as we arrived home from work. M was terribly affected. I felt bad for her and bad for the animals, even while knowing that the critters were pests that had to be removed. Leaving the house and coming home at night was a dicey affair during that period as we peered up flinchingly, hoping that the traps had gone unsprung that day.

We’ve had a few infrequent dealings with possums. A couple of times we’d see one in the cherry tree in back. Once I shooed one off the front porch; he was eating food we’d set out for Scooter back when we were trying to coax Scooter into the fold. Possums are the weirdest creatures, visually speaking. They look unfinished somehow. I have had to dispose of one possum that had been struck and killed by a car - right in front of our house, as luck would have it. M stayed inside as I took care of it. This is the husband’s job, after all. That and opening jars.

We haven’t seen any raccoons lately, but I know they’re around. Our first encounter with a raccoon took place when we found a young one that had been trapped in our shed near the end of a very hot day. From dirty paw marks on the wall, it looked as though the critter had climbed up and under a soffit to get inside. Soffits are a pain. M left the door open and set some food outside, but the raccoon wasn’t having any of it. It wasn’t until dark that the animal ventured out while we weren’t looking. It did take time to eat up the food, though. Nearby lives a family of raccoons that enter our yard now and again. There is something pleasurably spooky about seeing four or five sets of glowing eyes watching you from the back of the yard at night. On the other hand, there’s nothing pleasurable about raccoons getting into your garbage, which is why now I keep a huge brick atop the lid. The raccoon family formerly lived in a massive limb of a tree in our neighbor’s yard immediately behind us, but that limb fell off during a ferocious storm a few months ago. The neighbor reported later that he saw the raccoons trundling off in a line, headed for a tree in his neighbor’s yard. So far as I know, they live there still.

So that’s our wildlife situation. It’s a common enough story and these are common enough animals, but they provide a sense of connection to the natural world that is hard to come by in an urban setting, and would be a shame to lose.

We still have to decide what to do about Roxy.

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