I found the large utterly dead portion of my coffee berry bush back against the fence and quickly cut it out of there–it appeared to have been chewed.
The definition of a rodent is a mammal whose teeth never stop growing and will grow through the jaw and kill it if it doesn’t gnaw on things to grind them down.
I’m not about to poison them nor hire someone who would, I told a friend of mine.
Get a Havahart trap, was her answer; We did.
You can’t legally release it except right where you caught it.
Right. She said something to the effect that her husband had given theirs swimming lessons.
I looked up Havaharts in the correct size and came away thinking, I’m supposed to lift that big thing with a scared animal with teeth and claws in it and me with no sense of balance? What could be more fun?
So I took the problem to Richard.
He didn’t like the idea of giving them swimming lessons any more than I did. But he had worked up in the hills where ground squirrels are profusely abundant, which attracts rattlesnakes. His building had hired someone–who didn’t trap them, didn’t poison them, they put out contraceptives for them to reduce the population.
Would that affect the hawks? I wanted to know.
Not if there aren’t young being produced and the adults aren’t being sick or dying, right? He didn’t think so.
So I found this research and learned way more on the subject than I had intended. It’s not The Pill, it’s triggering an autoimmune reaction to their favorite parts in the spring. Huh. The gist of it as I read it is that they learned it takes six months to take full effect so they saw better results the second year than the first, where they’d given it too close to breeding time.
They noted that catching and inoculating hundreds of them took a lot of time.
I just want not to have hundreds. But yeah, the ground squirrel was back today (did I see two? Not sure) and that bush next to my apricot tree was showing me what a single one of them, much less a colony, could do.
There are four yards across the fence from ours that all have dogs and we do not. And we have by far the most fruit trees. Where would you hang out if you liked to pop out of your hole in the ground?
Open to all suggestions and stories.