Helping animals that visit in winter
The break in the weather coupled with the recent arrival of garden catalogs in the mail is always a boost to the spirit. Riffing the colorful pages awash with brilliant reds, shimmering greens and vivid yellows can make one long for sun-filled days and balmy nights which cannot arrive too soon.
I suppose the promise of spring is the same for the critters who paid a visit to our backyard the past week. We have an unwritten agreement with all four-footed animals who visit, offering them safe passage to someplace else.
A skunk sauntered past our rear window recently. It looked around and apparently did not see anything it liked. We also assume the footprints we saw in the snow belonged to a neighborhood cat which makes a nighttime appearance every so often. If it is vermin that it seeks, it should look someplace else.
A young raccoon visited us last week, moving in a southwesterly path across the yard. It is hoped that this junior scavenger had other things in mind and was not looking for squatter’s rights to corners of our property.
Some friends of ours dealt with an invasion by a large family of raccoons a few years back. I was told they set a baited cage trap in their backyard which would usually clang shut in the middle of the night. Making the ultimate sacrifice (awakening before 6 a.m.), they put the cage in their car trunk and drove to a rural site, freed the raccoon then drove back home. Ultimately the entire raccoon clan was furtively taken to the same place around the same time.
The Woman of our house thinks they broke more than a few statutes concerning the trap