crazy animal encounters

Have you considered giving a raccoon a good scratch?

 

Let's see... last summer, rats were literally on their way to totally decimating my garden... had I not taken action. I didn't get a ripe tomato or fig until August. Unacceptable!

I asked an exterminator why the sudden population boom in rats in my neighborhood, and what can I do about them besides rat poison. The last time I had a rat problem (right after Superstorm Sandy) I put rat poison out and ended up with a bunch of dead rats under my house and inside the walls... which totally stunk up the house for months! I was seeing little tunnels everywhere. The hawks couldn't keep up. So I wanted to avoid poison if possible.

The exterminator said that because the restaurants closed, rats had no main source of food... dumpsters. He said nobody cares if rats eat out of dumpsters, but with the restaurants closed, they had to spread out and infest everywhere else. So I got a bunch of rat traps, put them out by the holes near my foundation and around my garden, wood shed, etc. Between the traps, a .22 caliber pellet gun, and a lot of patience.... no more rats.

This year, I'm like... come at me, bro. I got something for you...

 

Same scenario at my school. No cafeteria. No food for the raccoons. Every day my custodian would take an 8' length of 2x6 and tip it into the dumpsters to let the raccoons scurry up and out. Every day there'd be like 5 of them stuck in there until he'd let them out.

Well... school shut down. The raccoons went in, but couldn't get out. When I went back to campus after a few weeks, I saw a bunch of turkey vultures standing on the dumpsters. I'm like, what the hell? I walk over, look in, and the both the sight and smell were unbearable.

 

I drove down a wooded road by the golf course last week, something caught my eye about 8 ft up in a tree. I saw this fuzzy face peek out from behind a limb and stopped right away, I thought for sure it was a monkey, I was about to call DEM and report it, thinking it was an escaped pet. It was a fisher cat. Strange animal.