Have Moles?

In springtime it is almost dangerous to walk across our lawn because of all the mole tunnels. It is actually difficult to walk due to sinking into the tunnels with almost every step.

I have not used chemicals on the lawn which results in having a lot of earthworms (earthworms are said to be super sensitive to salts, thus avoid such areas). Moles are reputed to be after grubs of beetles such as Japanese beetles, but the scientific community says they eat mostly earthworms and an occasional grub.

Once the weather is hot and drier, the worms go deeper and the moles follow them, but we are still frustrated by the great amount of damage from their work.

I have read several ways to get rid of them, and some are rather bizarre, it is a matter of 'buyer beware'! It is better explained here in this article, a two page information sheet from Purdue University titled: "Mole Control - Buyer Beware" by Timothy J. Gibb, Turfgrass IPM Specialist, in which he lists several popular deterrents that do not work. Some are frequently seen listed for sale in magazines and catalogs. Others are just old wives' tales, grass roots wisdom, word of mouth hearsay, or whatever you want to call it, that get passed around from person to person that are believed to be true, but are actually fallacies.

The best information I have found is the Purdue University Cooperative Extension Service's publication, Moles by Judy Loven. If the link does not work for you let me know, and I will see what I can do to help. They have changed the URL for that article at least once before, but I tracked it down. I could probably do it again for you if needed. The article covers about all you would ever need to know about moles.

We have had animals trapped, then released in other areas, but moles are a much greater challenge. They are extremely difficult to catch in any method humane or not. Husband/Best Friend/Chief Photographer thought he would take care of the problem here and proceeded to use a trap. He lasted about two days then gave up. If your lawn is completely riddled by them as ours is, and you want to know the challenge you are up against, you might be interested to see an illustration of a mole's kingdom. This link will take you to a map of the mole's world.

Hope you have better luck than I have. I still haven't been able to rid this place of moles. (I bet the fox could have.) They continue to come into my garden from the adjoining properties that were formerly farmland. Maybe someday they will be under control, but I don't think it will happen in my lifetime.

Times I wish it were all fenced and I could have a terrier. I know... terriers and gardening don't mix! ---Neither do gardening and moles.

Dividends?

Apparently I garden to feed wildlife. The whole place is a smorgasbord. Plus, it is fun to feed the birds additional food, and watch their cute selves up close. Feeding them purchased birdseed is one thing, but it does not stop with that. I am grateful that Nature pitches in with extra help sometimes, though I suspect she is using me.

When the Funny Feeder was put back into operation during the winter, filled with black sunflower seeds, the rowdy critters wasted a lot of it by knocking seeds onto the ground. I thought the squirrels, chipmunks, and doves were cleaning it up and being efficient, but look what happened.

Following photos are after the peak of bloom,
and, after they had been thinned some.

The Gold Finches hung upside down, hidden, as they clung to the flowers while they cleared away all the young seeds; it took only two or three days - if that long. I thought there were still seeds there, until Local Son showed me they were gone! All of that mess has been cleaned up now, and the feeder post has been made plumb.

Last year we took the local grandchildren out to an apple orchard where they could also select pumpkins for autumn decoration. They each chose one large pumpkin, then they wanted a few of the miniature ones that are about the size of a grapefruit. That was fun, and they placed them on their front porch for autumn, Halloween, and Thanksgiving. I told them when the pumpkins begin to go bad, I wanted them for my composter.

Then we enjoyed Thanksgiving Dinner at their house a few weeks later. As soon as dessert was served, one piped up and said, "You can take the pumpkins home with you when you leave. Thanksgiving is over and it's time to put out the Christmas things." I nearly fell off my chair laughing, we hadn't even left the table... but that is what we did.

When I have melons, winter squashes, or pumpkins, I like to remove the seeds and put them out somewhere for the Cardinals. The small pumpkins were so little, I just cut them open and set them on the ground around the Japanese tomato ring and let the Cardinals serve themselves.

Japanese Tomato Ring before the little pumpkins were placed.

This spring a very healthy pumpkin vine appeared. As soon as the first fruit was good and ripe, something ate it. The vine was rampant and ranging: it made eighteen little pumpkins. They were lovely little bright orange orbs.

Returning home one day, I came upon the scene of a massacre. Something had struck again and eaten five more.

It was either: Bandit,


OR... Scamper



OR... Grundoon
(I once pointed out a groundhog wandering in our back yard to our visiting four year old grandchild. Then I said, "Its name is Grundoon." The child said: "How do you know?")



OR... Pogo


...probably aided and abetted by... Alvin.

We gathered up the remaining twelve little pumpkins and brought them into the garage out of reach of the critters. We had purchased three small pumpkins, and this autumn we have twelve, plenty of seeds for next year, plus six were enjoyed by marauding wildlife. Seems to be a pretty good return on that investment; or, another way to look at it would be: That was an example of working with nature, and the benefits therefrom.

Long Paws Pause

Hurricane Ike brought us no rain. Only a few large scattered drops. We are in drought. The only thing this garden received from Ike was a wind storm with gusts of 60 miles an hour and 30 to 40 miles an hour sustained winds all day Sunday. The plants, large and small, felt its desiccating effects. That much wind and no rain in existing mild drought conditions is not a good thing.

The trees danced wildly and showed their limber resistance. We lost one tree and parts of others. There is much cleanup that needs to be done. The tree we lost is the largest and oldest of the redbud trees. I have a call in to the tree service company and a long to-do list waiting for them.

I may not get any writing done for a few days while the work is busy here. During the long pause, perhaps you would be interested in seeing other paws. So, I will leave you with a link to one section of my web site, The Garden At Crocker Croft.

That section is Critter Crossings. You might enjoy browsing around there, but be careful... Fizz lives in the basement (footer), and he bites!

Bandits!

One morning recently when I walked into the kitchen first time for the day, I got a sudden surprise! I started making my breakfast, then when I turned around, this is what was looking at me through the window.


It was in the tray on top of the funny feeder shoveling black sunflower seeds in its mouth as fast as it could go, and eating them whole, shell and all. Some birds do that, swallowing them whole, but one at a time. This bandit was shoveling them in en mass, chewing, and smacking away. No wonder the bird food was disappearing so rapidly. Squirrels do their part, and we enjoy watching them, but at least they take one seed at a time before reaching for another one.

Once it found easy dinner, the raccoon kept returning day after day. I finally found a trapper who would live trap and relocate the bandit far, far away.

Raccoons are an ever ongoing problem here. I am sure you have read your share of news relating how sprawling communities and developments have caused a clash between man and wildlife; how there is no more truly wild area for them to live in. When I ride out through the countryside, I see development everywhere and farms getting smaller and smaller. There is no country any more. Most everywhere is looking much neater, hedgerows and woodlots are cleaned and cleared. Therefore, the critters have no place to go. They are trying to live among us, and we among them. This causes conflicts. They haven't been taught manners. They are just trying to survive.

One year we did not get a single tomato from our plants. Whole sections of vines were pulled loose and strewed across the yard. I gathered them up and composted them. I did not suspect rabbits; I wondered if it might be groundhogs, but I suspected raccoons. Those little hands are just too handy and skillful. I kept maligning raccoons. One day our local son was over here, and he said he wouldn't have believed me if he had not found a raccoon's muddy, little paw prints on the yard chair he had given me. He laughed about how perfect and visible they were.

Several years ago I was enjoying my new Green Cone Composter that was set into the earth near the garden door. Then one day I went out the door and the lid was flipped over. A hole had been dug into the plastic basket section that is buried in the ground, and on the outside were little muddy hand prints sliding down the side from the top.

It was obvious what had happened. Something had dug into the ground under the cone, ripped into the plastic basket to get to kitchen scraps that are deposited and fall there. They ate what they could find then came out the top, pushing the lid out of the way, then slid down the outside of the plastic green cone leaving a trail of muddy little hand prints elongated into a slide down the outside. Pretty cute, actually. I told Husband/Best Friend/ Chief Photographer that if they had been smart enough to close the lid, I would not have noticed it; it was the open top that gave them away. Not sure I would have noticed the sliding paw prints. I closed it. Next day or two it was open again. It had been raining, so my compost was much too wet and composting action had ceased. I began to get riled!

I kept closing it, and they kept opening it. I put a heavy rock on top, but I didn't like that, because when I go out with a bowl of scraps in one hand, I am not strong enough to lift that rock with just the one other hand. I was spoiled, I wanted to do it my way, the way it was meant to be used. With one hand I open the kitchen door, go down the steps, open the garden door, open its storm door; I reach and flip the lid, deposit scraps, then flip lid back on. Task completed all with one hand. I did not want to have to set the bowl down in order to remove the rock. Then have to set it down again, while I replace the rock. Besides, sometimes it was raining, or sleeting, or snowing, or dark.

I called a trapper and showed him what was happening. He set a live trap against the house beside the composter, then went on his way. I was supposed to call him if he caught something. I was busy as usual and one day I was weeding and working in an area near the composter and trap. After awhile I grew a bit weary, so I sat back, stretched, looked up, and gazed about to rest. A minute or two later, I glanced toward the trap. There, silently watching me was a beautiful, full grown, white, longhair cat that I had never seen before. "Oh, kitty! How long have you been there!" I went over and released it. It shot out of sight without making a sound. I never saw that cat again, don't know where it came from, and don't know where it went.

I called the trapper who came and reset the trap. Several days later, I was weeding almost in the same place and almost the same thing happened. After I had worked a good long while, I sat up looked around, and couldn't believe my eyes! There were two cats in the trap. This time they were young, half grown cats that I had never seen before. I turned them loose, they bolted, and I never saw them again. I called the trapper: same song, second verse... you caught two cats this time. He said, "I never caught cats before on raccoon bait." I replied maybe it had something to do with the curiosity of cats; I'd often heard the old saying, "curiosity killed the cat". That is why I requested live traps, as opposed to killing traps. We do not have pets, but other people in the neighborhood do.

In time the bandit was caught and relocated. Trapper reset the trap saying that there is usually a family that stays together and prowls together. Sure enough another bandit was trapped and relocated. I think that trapper took them out to city property where there is a large lake. That was better than another one who released them on a man's farm where he trained coonhounds to hunt.

A few years after that, Husband/Best Friend/Chief Photographer and I were sitting at the kitchen table having a meal. I have been blessed with farsightedness all my life, so when something moved in the distance I beaded in on it. "I see a raccoon!" Husband: "Really, where?!" "Way out there on the bank coming out of a hole in a tree. It's walking down the slope of that fallen limb." Almost immediately, "I see another raccoon! There are two of them! No! there's another one, oh!, and another little one! It's a mother and three little ones!!!" Well, that was something we don't see every day!

I remember the first raccoon I ever saw. I was four years old and news went out through the neighborhood kids' grapevine that someone had a raccoon in a cage. I had never seen one. We kids went to see it, and there the poor thing was, in a cage on the ground, eating kitchen scraps someone had put in there with it. As I stood staring, its little hands picked up a lump of cornbread, dipped it into the water as some raccoons do all their food, and as I watched the cornbread melted and ran between its little fingers and disappeared into the pan of water. I felt so sorry for the critter, that I have never forgotten it.

There is no special ending to this story. I stood in my kitchen watching a medium sized raccoon gobbling up the black sunflower seeds. It was small compared to some I have seen. I estimated that it was one year old. I couldn't help but remember the one I hit while driving the car on a very busy interstate highway motorway. I was in the middle lane of three lanes all going the same direction. Suddenly, there was the largest raccoon I ever saw in my life; it looked as big as a Smoky Mountains black bear, I could not miss it for I was running alongside large, eighteen-wheeled trailer-trucks and running at their speed. I didn't dare swerve. I steeled myself, and hit the poor beast. How it lived to cross that far is a wonder, but its luck ran out, and softhearted me had to be the one to hit it. And, as you see, I never forgot that one, either.

So, I called another trapper. I seem to run through trappers as some women run through new shoes and nylon stockings. Every year or two, the previous ones have moved on and are no longer in the phone book, so I search around and find another one.

This new one arrived, I explained the problem, and mentioned that he might as well set the trap at the base of the bird feeder's post. He did just that, and the next morning there was Bandit inside the trap ready to go for a ride. He gave it some food and swung trap, Bandit, and all up into the bed of his pickup truck.

Remembering what I had been told about them moving about in families, I asked him to set another trap before he left. That one he set against the house farther down under the weeping crab apple tree.

That weeping crab apple tree grows not far from the head of my bed. Being a light sleeper, many, many times I have been awakened in the night by a loud thump on the roof close by. Sometimes I hear them running: thurlump, thurlump, thurlump.... and then sometimes, boi...iiing as they jump up on the chimney and hit that metal chimney cover high above the fireplace at the foot of my bed. They gather there especially in cold weather for it is warm at the flue from our furnace. Sometimes getting on or off the roof they hit the metal rain gutter on the edge of the roof with a loud boing.

Neighbors across the street had a family of raccoons living in their chimney; they liked to have never gotten them all out of there. I have heard of people who had a flea infestation in their house and found that they were coming from raccoons living in the chimney. Once they got rid of the raccoons and the fleas that were already in the house, the problem was gone.

Too bad the little things don't know how to be quiet, or how to shut the lid on a composter; I am sure there are other things out there in the night that I am never aware of because they are quiet. But, this trapper did as I asked and set the trap under that tree next to the wall of the house where they jump in and out of the tree. Next morning, I checked the trap yet again as I had many, many times over the years. And, guess what! Two tiny little faces looked back at me. Talk about cute! Oh, my! The larger one, probably a male, growled at us. Cute!

I called the trapper's office and left the message for him that he had caught two raccoons this time! He thought the one he caught a few days earlier was probably the mother of these two little ones. He said, "I will take them to the same place I took their mother. Maybe they will find each other."
I hope they did.

Ribbons In the Pine

One late January morning during breakfast as I was facing the back window, I noticed what appeared to be long stringing ribbons hanging in the pine tree up high and close to the trunk in a section of thick foliage, but hanging long enough to be swinging in the breeze. There were several of them. I wondered: what in the world is that hanging out of the tree! I watched the curious sight then forgot about it until sometime later when the movement of hanging, swinging “ribbons” caught my attention again. Then I realized what it is... a squirrel’s nest. It is still there.

I have read that squirrels mate and have their first litter in February in a nest they built in a cavity in the trunk of a tree. If a cavity cannot be found, then they build close to the trunk. February seems a cold time to be having those tiny, naked little “pinkies”, as I have heard them called. Brrrr, poor little things! I hope mama stays with them to keep them warm, but she must leave to find water and food for herself sometime!

Later in summertime they have another family in a nest out on a branch where it is cooler and can catch the summer breezes. I have read that the mother may take them back and forth from one nest to the other depending on the weather and temperature.

Their nests are large, bulky, bushy, amusing to see, collections of leaves and whatever else the homebuilder finds attractive and useful. That is what I was seeing up in the tall White Pine tree.

At first I thought the “ribbons” were pieces of old dead strap foliage from daylilies. Later I realized the daylily foliage was already rotted away so it couldn’t be that. Then during a front yard clean up, I discovered long strands of ornamental grass were all over our yard and the two either side of us. The long tan strips were blowing about the neighborhood from the across-the-street neighbors’ large, fairly new landscaping clumps. They were everywhere, and as I picked them up it dawned on me that was what I was seeing hanging up in the pine tree --- the squirrels had found a new building material.

Most of what I know about squirrels I learned while reading, and a little from observation of the resident squirrels in places where we have lived.

Here in the eastern United States we mainly have the cute little gray squirrels Sciurus Carolinensis. I am just guessing, but I suppose they were so named due to their eastern locations in the Carolinas – states: North Carolina and South Carolina, U.S.A.

I read that a black form of this species is seen in the most northern states and Canada. I have seen them in Ontario. Also, albino gray squirrels are not uncommon, especially inside towns where they are safer from predators. I know several have been seen in two towns that are 42 miles apart as the crow flies and located in western Tennessee: Jackson and Rutherford, Tennessee. The Rutherford white squirrels were well known. Then in a few years albinos were noticed in Jackson.

Usually the gray squirrel is predominately gray and in wintertime has cute little buff-colored tufts of fur on the tips of their ears; they remind me of earmuffs. The species is usually mild mannered and are driven out of their territory if the fox squirrels move in.

However, in the British Isles it seems the gray squirrel has somehow arrived there and, sadly, is causing the population of the smaller native red squirrels to decline. I am sorry about that. Too bad they cannot collect all the gray squirrels they have and swap them to us for all the English House Sparrows, House Finches, starlings, grackles, and probably a few other of their native species that are wreaking havoc over here.

During a lovely, relaxing weekend in one of Kentucky’s state resort parks, I especially enjoyed watching the squirrels on their feeders just outside the huge windows of the dining lodge. They were so cute, so full of antics, and put on such a show; I decided we should have such a feeder at home.

A similar feeder was installed here near our kitchen’s back window and stocked with uncrushed, whole grain corn. They, and an enterprising, fat little chipmunk, entertained us greatly. All day everyday they were running up and down that wooden pole putting on a show for us… and burying it all about the place. We had squirrel planted corn coming up everywhere!

Here are a few photos of baby gray squirrels when they are older and have grown their fur coats.

All squirrel photos courtesy of Morguefile.com.

A Funny Feeder