Animal House

Suburbia is reputed to be the Land of the Automobile, the Land of the Strip Mall and the Land of the McMansion, and there is a good deal of truth to all of those appellations.  It must be noted, however, that Nature was here long before the Interstate Highway System came through and Target Stores set up shop, and she hasn't surrendered yet to the inexorable march of human civilization and the construction industry.

The neighborhood where my family lives is green with lawns, bushes and mature trees, with bands of forest land, streams, ponds and little corners of marshland here and there, and it turns out that all of that is conducive to the flourishing of wildlife.  Anyone sitting in our family room at the right time of morning or evening can glance out the window into our backyard and see squirrels, robins, the occasional rabbit, and the very occasional opossum.  This is also the time of year for cardinals (of the avian, not Roman variety).   A few times, for reasons we can't explain, ducks have waddled past.  Twice I've seen deer walking through the yard, and coyotes are known to trot by.  If our windows are open and the television is off, the chattering and piping of songbirds provides a soundtrack, especially in the early morning.

Some local species don't seem to be doing that well: when we moved into the area in the 1990s, there were large flocks of crows living in the area, but I haven't heard a crow cawing for some years - I'm given to understand that their numbers have been greatly reduced by some form of avian illness.  But some species are thriving so well in suburbia that they've become nuisances.  Coyotes are among them.  So are Canada geese.  And so are skunks - for whatever reason, their numbers have been multiplying in recent years.

We humans live under the delusion that we've signed some sort of treaty with the other animal species, the understanding being that we own the Inside and they own the Outside, at least when we're not using it.  But the other species have a different understanding of how this works: to their way of thinking, all of these structures we've built, like houses, garages and garden sheds, are forms of Terrain, and are fair game for doing the species thing, which turns out to be pretty similar to what has drawn humans to suburbia: building a home and reproducing.

In the thirty years or so we've been in this house, the animal kingdom has made three major encroachments into our domicile.  The first assault was from the air.  We were first made aware of it one weekday morning when a sparrow managed to wriggle through the space between the door of our furnace room and the floor, and popped out into our family room.  At the time, we owned a cat who was an enthusiastic if ineffective hunter.  One of his favorite resting places (all cats have at least 20 or 30 such spots throughout a house) was atop a tall bookcase that is located right next to the furnace room entrance.  Imagine his surprise that morning when a bird suddenly appeared seven feet below where he was settling down for his morning nap.  I wasn't present to witness what transpired, but my wife reports that it was a real-life version of Sylvester and Tweetie, with the bird zipping all over the room and the cat in hot pursuit.  My wife was able to get the patio door open, and the bird made its escape.

In the aftermath of that incident, reflecting on the phenomenon of a bird coming out of our furnace room, we thought that didn't seem right.  We asked some neighbors, who agreed with us, and advised us to get our furnace checked out.  The upshot was that there was no cap on our chimney, and a family of sparrows (or starlings or some such) had built a nest down the chimney.  The bird in question had somehow made it through the duct system into the furnace room.  The furnace guy cleaned out the furnace (seems we were fortunate; the nest could have blocked the furnace exhaust and killed us all in our sleep) and referred us to a guy who capped the chimney with some fencing similar to chicken wire.

The next incursion also was from above.  The outer part of the house that includes the family room has a gable vent at the peak of the roof, which consisted of slats of wood.  Somehow a raccoon or similar critter managed to scratch or chew its way through, and took up residence in our attic.  We could hear it walking above us; and we could also hear something running around with little pitters and patters, which we were pretty sure were squirrels.  Once again, we consulted neighbors, who advised us to call a Raccoon Service.  I was previously unaware of the existence of such a service, but I consulted Google and Yelp, and came up with a humane service that had the requisite number of stars.  They sent a guy out with a cage trap, a ladder and a jar of smoked fish paste.  He baited the trap with the paste, and set it on the roof near the gable vent.  He advised us to take a look at the trap each morning, and call him if we saw anything.  That very night, the trap caught a raccoon.  It was enormous: it barely fit inside the trap.  We called the guy, he came out and took the cage with him.

This is the first point, in this series of incidents between man and beast, at which I felt a few faint pricks of conscience.  As I gazed at the roof, the animal struggled a little bit to try to get itself out of the cage.  It wasn't much of a struggle; it looked exhausted.  I don't know how long it had been in the trap, but my interpretation of the incident was that it had been trying for hours to get itself out and was just about spent.

So when the Raccoon Service guy came out to retrieve the trap, I asked him if "humane" meant that he would do a live release somewhere - hopefully, far away from our house.  He chuckled at my squeamishness and naivete.  No, getting itself trapped spelled the permanent end of Mr. Raccoon's criminal career, but he assured me that it would be ushered off to Raccoon Heaven in a way that wouldn't cause it any pain.  Then the guy repaired the vent.  Honestly, it doesn't look great - it's covered with chicken wire - but it's done the job: we haven't had an attic issue since then.

Our most recent issue was from below.  A couple of weeks ago, my son and I noticed a skunk waddling away from the house through the backyard, heading for a large bird feeder on the property of the neighbor whose back yard abuts ours.  The feeder serves as the local restaurant and pick-up joint for the neighborhood fauna.  "Huh, that's kind of interesting" we thought when we saw the skunk, and then we turned our attention back to our ballgame.  However, a couple of days later, the neighbor let my wife know that he had seen a skunk actually emerging from beneath our house.  My wife did a walk-around inspection, and found the spot - right beneath our bedroom window - where the skunk seemed to have burrowed a little home for itself.

We were worried that it might find, or create, a path into our crawl space.  So we called the Raccoon Service, which, it turns out, also is a Skunk Service.  The guy basically followed the same procedure with traps and bait as with the raccoon, except this time the trap was set on the ground near the burrow.  Nothing was captured the first night, but the second night it caught a skunk.  Possibly the service had recorded some customer-service notes regarding my squeamishness from the raccoon episode, because the guy took pains to let me know that, in Illinois, state law requires that all captured skunks be killed, as it's the species that is the most common carrier of rabies.  So that was the end of the line for Mr. Skunk - or, as I now suspect, Mrs. Skunk.

Apparently, catching a single skunk doesn't necessarily signify the end of the infestation problem, so when the guy took the captured skunk away, he set a new trap, and put what he described as a permeable barrier - basically, a layer of dirt and gravel - over the burrow entrance.  The idea was that, if there were any more skunks in the burrow, they'd dig through the barrier, and that would provide visual evidence that any new capture also had come from under the house.  The guy also scheduled some repair work - more chicken wire, I fear - but they wouldn't be able to do the work for a week or so.  Between the date of that initial skunk capture and the date of the repair work, he'd try to trap any other skunks that emerged.

The next night, the trap caught an opossum.  The permeable barrier was still intact, meaning that the opossum hadn't come from under the house, so I suggested to the guy that he could do a live release, but he said he couldn't.  He took away the opossum and set yet another trap.

The next night, we caught another skunk, and this time the permeable barrier had been breached.  This one was a juvenile - so small that the guy from the service assured me that its "squirt ability" hadn't developed yet.  He cooed and squealed over it like a little girl with a new puppy - which I thought was kind of an interesting exercise in compartmentalization, inasmuch as he was required by state law to dispatch it shortly.  Once again, he set a new trap and reset the barrier.

That was yesterday morning.  Later that same afternoon, we saw another juvenile skunk wandering around in the backyard.  By this point, my wife and kids were getting really upset at the notion that our family was cooperating in the deaths of baby animals.  Their anxiety was further heightened when my wife checked the trap and noted that it had already caught, not one, but two more juveniles.  My daughter hopped onto Google to see if there was a nature preserve or some similar entity that could rescue the skunks, just as there are organizations that will rescue a litter of unwanted puppies or kittens.  It seems there are no such organizations in Illinois, no doubt because of that state law.  There are some in Indiana and Missouri, but we'd have to somehow catch the skunks and transport them, and that sounded beyond our capability.

So today, the service came again, took away the two little skunks in the trap, and also was able to catch the juvenile (or it may have been a different one, who knows) that was wandering around the back yard.  That little feller, it turns out, was more mature than the guy suspected: it managed to give him a good squirt and the yard smelled pretty skunky for a while this afternoon.

It seems likely enough to me that the first capture was a mamma skunk that had a litter in the burrow.  Our traps have been picking off her litter ever since; presumably the little ones, growing hungry with no mamma, have been emerging to see if there is any food to be had.

The final score of all this seems to be a series of dead animals, including some very young and helpless ones, and a suburban home gradually becoming encased in chicken wire.  I don't feel real great about that.  On the other hand, I need to have a livable home, and as is the case for a lot of middle class types, the house is among my largest assets.  I can't just give it back to nature.  Maybe the treaty is really an armistice.