Groundhogs and Squirrels and Skunks, Oh My!

Have you noticed, those of you who live in houses, that your backyard has turned into a wildlife park?  

When I was a kid growing up on Long Island, we peacefully coexisted with squirrels and the usual backyard birds. 

At my place in State College, the squirrels are joined by a rotating cast of rabbits, chipmunks, groundhogs and an occasional skunk, while high above the chatter of the backyard birds wheel crows, a Cooper’s hawk and a redtail hawk that whistles incessantly like a sickly tea kettle.  

Clearly, Central Pennsylvania is a wilder place than the New York metropolitan area, but reports of coyotes and racoons prowling urban neighborhoods suggest there’s something else afoot (a-paw? a-talon?).  

Wildlife biologists talk about habituation, the process whereby our feral friends lose their fear of humans and start to see us less as menaces than as meal tickets. This makes sense in neighborhoods where more of us grow our dinner than shoot it. The reduced fear factor would also explain why some of the wild things let us get closer to them than they used to.  

It would be a peaceable kingdom if the critters stuck to nibbling leaves and grass. Last summer, they all feasted on our garden while the groundhogs essentially built a subway line down our street, with each of our yards being one of the stations. 

This year, we came home from our summer travels to find that we had no Internet connection. Horrors, right?

I thought it must have been a power failure-related software problem. But when no amount of remote tinkering would avail, our provider sent a repairman, who traced the outage to a chewed-through cable.

That was when we asked Mary across the street if we could borrow her Haveahart trap — the kind that captures the critter rather than breaks its neck or mangles a paw. The idea is that once you’ve nabbed the nuisance, you take it for a nice, long drive in the country, releasing it far from all human habitation so it doesn’t become someone else’s pest. 

The first thing we noticed once we’d baited the trap was that chipmunks are so light-footed that they are able to dash in, grab the apple slice and dash back out without disturbing the delicate balance that keeps the cage from clanging shut. Which was fine by us. We were after bigger game, specifically, the groundhogs.

Our next prisoner, though, was a squirrel. A confined squirrel behaves like a caroming Superball in a narrow hallway. I imagined him saying to himself over and over, “gotta be a way out, gotta be a way out.”

There was, but it entailed my opening the trap. Once I did, he exploded out the chute like a cinched rodeo bull. 

Then came the morning when my fellow trapper and I jumped back at the same moment and loudly whispered, “Skunk!”

Now what?

More often than not, in the 21^st century, the answer to “now what?” is YouTube videos. Here is what I learned: 

Drape a blanket or tarp over the trap, talking quietly to your captive as you do so. That way, neither the sound nor the sight of you will startle the skunk into making a stink.

If you do startle the skunk, it will stamp its feet and raise its tail, at which point you would do well to back off and let it calm down before trying again. (If the skunk sprays, the blanket or tarp will take the direct hit, not you.)

Next you gently put the covered trap in your car and drive the skunk to Outer Klopstokia.

I did not want to do any of these things. I recalled that intrepid Mary had once caught a skunk. So I texted her, asking what she did. 

“Do you want me to come over?” she asked.

I did, fervently.

Moments later, she knocked at my door. I waved her inside. 

“I’ve already done it,” she said.

She had, in fact, gone around to the backyard, skipped the blanket step and the whisper-sweet-nothings step and opened the trap. The skunk, unlike the squirrel, deliberated briefly and then waddled off into the bushes.
Sensing that her aplomb had made me ashamed of my wimpiness, Mary reminded me that I was, first and always, an urban person, whereas she had lived in the country. I appreciated the face-saving she was offering me, but mostly I was relieved that she’d solved my problem.

A day later, I gave her back her Havahart. 

Finally, no tale of neighborhood wildlife encounters would be complete without some mention of insects. A few days after the skunk incident, I was walking across the park when I felt a sharp pain in my inner thigh and then another sharp pain in my outer thigh. 

When I got home, I dropped trou to investigate. A live wasp tumbled out onto the bathroom floor. 

The stings itched and hurt and glowed bright red for days. 

Clearly this habituation business has gone too far.