Lesley Grant Law (wife of Leslie) is back with more animal tales from Florida. You may remember her first blog last year, introducing us to the bugs, spiders, and gators sharing space in the sunshine state. I’m sure we’ve all had pest problems at one time or another…but here Lesley describes it as only she can. Thanks for writing, Lesley, and thanks for reading!
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From Lesley:
I am a terrible killer. Ever since I was young I pretty much adored all animals with the exception of what I would consider the “standard issue unlovables:” reptiles and insects. When I was 16 and just started to drive, I absolutely trashed my mother’s Audi when on the way to the barn one afternoon I swerved to avoid a raccoon and instead ran the Audi up alongside a barbwire fence for about 50 feet. I got out of the car, saw the front grill/bumper on the road, the barbwire scratches all down the side, started bawling and then just left the car there and walked the final mile to the barn. Can you imagine? Being a parent now, I am unsure of exactly what I would do to our child if they did that. That is part of being 16 I guess, not thinking that the raccoon probably had rabies and was about to die anyways if it was waltzing along in broad daylight and that that bumper probably cost about six grand. Point being, ever since I was a kid, I have done my utmost to preserve animal life even if it just about cost me my own at my parents’ hands.
I tell you this so that you have some background information for my latest conundrum: mousetraps.
Every time the weather changes from hot to cold here in Florida we acquire a new tenant– a mouse. Now my friends, who apparently are “Mouse Experts,” scoff at me as they claim that one never gets just ONE mouse. Yet apparently we are an exception to the rule because our mice are clearly loners as I have never seen more than one in a season. The first time it happened was last year when it got chilly and Leslie went into his sweater drawer and low and behold, every one of his four cashmere sweaters had some kind of small hole in it. At first I thought perhaps moths? But alas no, there was poop and as far as I know, moths don’t poop. (Not visibly at least.) As you can well imagine, Leslie was very upset as here he was sans sweaters in the cooler weather. Luckily for him, this happened just prior to Christmas so I was able to put in the good word to my mom who is the gifter of the sweaters. Although in the past mom was a “one sweater gifter” to Leslie, now that he has provided her with her one and only grandson, he has moved up to “multiple-sweater” eligibility and thus he did receive more cashmere in a short period of time. Sweater crisis solved, I still had to locate and remove said pest.
Living in the heart of bug country, we have a contract with a pest control company so I gave them a ring and told them of our problem but also explained that we had dogs and a young child so poison was out of the question. Their solution was what they called a sticky trap that looks like a long paper teepee and has some NASA grade glue all over the bottom. The pest guy hid these all over our house and within a few days I woke up to some very concerned squeaking and sure enough there was a tiny mouse stuck in one of these traps. Now what? He (I assume it was a he but certainly it could well have been a she) was very clean and sweet looking; this little grey Mickey. I felt terrible about what I had done to him and couldn’t imagine just throwing him out to have him starve to death. Luckily we had a new working student fresh in from Texas. Lovely girl, I took the woeful mouse out to her and told her that one of her first duties was to cut this mouse very carefully out of the trap. She grabbed some scissors and a few other sharp objects and with time, concentration and precision she cut that little guy out of that trap and sent him on his way. I couldn’t help thinking that with her exceptional hand/eye coordination she was most certainly wasting her time here and should be at school to be a surgeon. Anyhoo, off this mouse went, happy as Larry, with his fancy new little white pads on his feet. If you are ever in Florida and see a mouse with some white booties on, you will know who he is.
This season I had thought we had avoided all mouse encounters until one morning when Leslie was sitting at his computer at 5 am he noticed a mouse breaking his fast on our loaf of bread which sat on top of the fridge. When I stumbled into the kitchen at 7am (Leslie is a morning person, I…not so much) I was greeted with, “There is a mouse eating our bread.” I had been told, so off to task I went. This year I felt much more prepared being an experienced mouse hunter and all. I had left all the traps out from last year as I figured they were out of sight and it couldn’t hurt to leave them out so I just figured I would gather them all up that night and place them strategically around the bread so that if our friend got the midnight munchies he would undoubtedly have to step into a trap. Sadly our former working student’s term had come and gone so I wasn’t sure how I was going to get the mouse out of the trap but I figured one step at a time. I even went so far as to go to the hardware store that day and buy some extra sticky traps, different ones that were just flat larger trays so I was sure to nab Mickey before he ate too much of our bread. That night right before bed as Leslie was washing up in the bathroom, I, with battle-planning precision, placed out my new glue trays on the top of the fridge around the bread and then skipped around the house picking up the old teepees out of their hiding places to add to the new. One of the old traps was on the floor behind the headboard of our bed. I had seen it out of the corner of my eye every morning for a year as I make the bed. With face smushed up to the headboard I leaned over with arm stretched behind the bed and hooked a finger under the top of the teepee. That is when everything went horribly wrong.
Upon immediate contact of fingertip with the trap I knew something was gravely amiss. The trap was heavy; very heavy. My heart raced, I flew back against the wall, what on earth was going on? If there had been a mouse caught surely we would have heard the squeaks what with it being right behind our heads and all. I turned on the light, took a deep breath and in that moment wished I was one of those Americans with a baseball bat in the bedroom as I peeked behind the bed. It was a snake. A leviathan of a creature, it had slithered its dirty way into the trap and then having gotten stuck had curled its body around it. I couldn’t even scream. Hello?? This was my BED people! I mean, I don’t go to bed in jeans and a sweater if you get my drift. This snake could have done unmentionable things to me and scarred me for life mentally if not physically. I ran into the bathroom where Leslie was brushing his teeth and just started pointing. You can imagine Leslie with bubbles coming out of his mouth saying “What?!!! What???!! A mouse?” Oh no! I shook my head violently and continued to point. Leslie loves snakes about as much as I do. However, having the testosterone in the relationship I think makes him feel obliged to at least pretend to be braver than I. “What are we going to do with that?” he asked. Luckily I am heavily college educated so I came up with the plan of grabbing our household broom so that Leslie could stick the end of it through the teepee and in this manner lift the trap and snake out of the house. I removed myself far off into the other room as he paraded the beast out onto the back deck to which I then could hear him curse “Now the bloody broom is stuck to it.” The broom, the snake and the trap all got left out on the deck that night. I am as cheap as they come but I happily sacrificed that house broom for the cause. I then spent the next hour on hands and knees scouring our house for any additional asps while at the same time furiously chastising our terrier for clearly being incompetent. This house is not a welfare state my friend, you work for your kibble. I could not believe any self-respecting terrier would allow a snake to be under their person’s bed. Luckily, as with our mice, our snakes appear to have no friends as well.
But what of the mouse, you might wonder. Well he proved a very cleaver rodent indeed as it took a few days to outwit him but eventually I saw him make a run behind our bathroom cabinet where I was then able to place a teepee on both ends of the cabinet and in time, he was caught. But alas, that was not to be the end to my mousetrap woes. For whatever reason, I left out one glue tray on top of our fridge, something I would notice casually every time I opened it. One afternoon I went into the house for a drink and noticed that Leslie had left the front door open (I know right? No wonder we have snakes and mice… anyhoo…). As I went into the fridge I noticed that the tray was gone. But oh no…it wasn’t gone, only moved. It had shifted five or six inches back behind some 8×10″ photos I have on top of our fridge and on it were two, large, pulsating, fuzzy things. If they were mice, they were the king of all mice, these things were large. I ran sweating and breathing heavily onto our porch and looked around for help. Leslie was up teaching in the back field so that was no good, next I yelled out to our neighbors but they didn’t hear. I paced back and forth across our deck until finally our gal Kerri stepped into view. “Kerri I need you now!” I screamed. Kerri has been with us forever so she is well used to my disdain for creatures in places they ought not to be. Kerri is a brave, strong girl much better than I and she valiantly pulled the tray into view where horror of horrors there were two completely devastated birds. I just about threw up. It was like a Sally Struthers commercial showing terrible videos in the hopes that you will give money to save the birds from the oil spills. Now before Laine Ashker sticks PETA on me (our Laine is a true bird lover from what I know), trust me, I would never hurt a bird in my life. I had a budgie as a first pet for the love of god. I felt disgusted; it was sickening. How these two birds had flown into our house and both landed on this trap is beyond me. I really should have gone straight off and bought a lotto ticket.
I have since removed all gluey things from our house although I am of two minds about that seeing as they did most certainly save our lives from the snake. I have decided that I have awful luck with hunting and trapping anything and although we have now become home to an armadillo under our porch I think for the time being at least…I am going to let him be.
