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| Home Sweet Home |
One late fall afternoon, I had the door to the trailer open to enjoy the mild weather when I noticed something about the size of a small cat with tan brown and white fur scurry across the ground outside. It went from under one of our vehicles to hide behind some plywood we had leaned against the storage shed. Jeff was outside, so I asked him if he saw it. He moved some of the plywood and out popped this animal I thought looked like a Chinchilla. It had large eyes and ears and a somewhat fluffy tail. It was kind of cute, but what in heaven’s name was it?
To get a better look at this critter, Jeff set out a few pieces of cat food in a dish and we quietly waited to see if it would come out from under the VW bus and eat the food. It did come out, and quite brazenly too, especially since it was late afternoon and it would have been highly visible to any hunting hawks.
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| White-throated Woodrat, quick sketch |
Even after a good look, neither one of us was completely certain what it was, so the next time we went down to town to use the computer at the library we searched on-line. (Note: At this point in time, we didn’t have a phone line to our property, there wasn’t cell phone service and we certainly didn’t have a personal computer.) We found out it was a white throated wood rat, often called a pack rat. They could be found living at high altitudes, in rocky terrain and ponderosa forests. Okay, we could check all three of those boxes! Now we knew what the critter was, but we had no idea that a battle of wits had just begun.
One night about 3:00 am, we heard loud scratching noises in the ceiling just above our heads. What was that? Jeff went outside to check but couldn’t see anything. He banged on the ceiling and the noise stopped for awhile but soon those scrabbling noises started up again. It sounded way too loud for a mouse, good heavens, could that possibly be the wood rat?
The walls and ceiling of the 1972 Prowler RV trailer we were living in were made of thin plywood with about a 2 inch layer of insulation between that plywood and the outside metal skin, even rain and hail storms were noisy, but good grief, it was hard to sleep with some large rodent up there making those annoying sounds just above our heads. It would settle down and we would drift off to sleep, only to be awakened again by that scratching! I still remember the vivid dream I had one night of seeing that wood rat’s face peering down on me after I dreamed it had gnawed a hole through the ceiling. Yeeesh.
The next morning Jeff went on the roof and noticed that the vent for our propane stove was the entrance point. He had put window screen over it previously to keep birds out, but this animal had chewed right through that, so he cut a small sheet of expanded metal mesh and attached it over the vent. Perfect.
That night, the scratching sounds started again! Good grief, we had inadvertently trapped the thing in! Sigh, we hadn’t given enough thought about this being a nocturnal animal. We couldn’t use poison, we didn’t want it dead in our walls, so how were we going to get it out? Jeff took the metal screen off and then spent the next few nights waking up at 3am to put it back on after all seemed quiet. We thought he could block the wood rat out after it had gone out to search for food. Nope, nope and nope!
Eventually Jeff came up with a different tactic. The pilot light for our propane fridge was accessible from a small hatch on the outside of the trailer. This hatch was long and narrow, about 16 inches long and 4 inches wide. When he took the hatch off, we could see by the poo-pellets left behind that our wood rat had been to that part of trailer. Great! Jeff decided to leave the hatch off hoping the wood rat would leap the 4 feet to the ground or jump over to the small juniper tree trunk that was only a little over a foot away from the side of the trailer. Problem solved.
Nope. That night we could still hear our unwanted “upstairs” neighbor moving around in the ceiling! That wood rat had moved in with us and wasn’t taking any of our hints to leave.
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| Follow the Trail, please! |
Jeff wasn't defeated yet, he took that long hatch door from the trailer and made a temporary bridge by balancing one end from a knot on the juniper tree’s trunk and resting the other end on the lip of the open hatch on the trailer. Then the best idea of all, he put a line of dry cat food pieces along his makeshift gangway.
We got into bed carefully that night, making certain we didn’t shake the trailer too much and undo Jeff’s handiwork. Generally, it’s not great to be awakened at 3:00 am, but it was the best thing in the world to hear that small piece of metal slap the side of the trailer and fall. After a few moments of celebration, we debated if it was worth going outside in the cold to put the cover back on the hatch. Jeff decided he wasn’t taking any chances and went outside and put the hatch cover back in place. Thank heaven he did.
We had just settled back down under the covers and started feeling sleepy when we heard the most unsettling thing of all, the sound of a wood rat’s tiny toenails scraping down the metal siding of the trailer! It was trying to get back in by leaping from the juniper tree and aiming for the once open hatch! Yikes!
It gave me such an eerie feeling that this animal was so determined to get what it wanted and it was my first inkling that I had underestimated what the smaller wildlife we were sharing this mountainside with were capable of.
Happy creating!
>^-^<
Tina
p.s. My right eye has been fairly stable as long as I keep using the steroid eye drops, still no diagnosis as to why I have this condition. I only have the MRI test left to do, but with the current Covid-19 virus trouble, that may take awhile to schedule.
