F Is For Food

...and also for Fate, which has decreed that our garage shall be devoured by porcupines.

In June, our drawn-out battles with the porcupine who'd been eating the garage all spring came to a bloody end (you can read about it here).

At the time, one of you commented that she hoped he was the only one.  After a post in which I wrote about hearing hair-raising screams in the night, another of you said that perhaps it was a porcupine in mourning.  You were both right:  he was not the only one, and now one of his survivors is gnawing on the garage.

Is it the porcupine's widow, trying to assuage her grief by feasting on the painted wood?  Is it a son or daughter bent, like Orestes or Electra, on avenging the father's murder?  Or is it just a random porcupine, one of the procession of deer, fisher cats, turkeys, bears and moose that casually roam our land?  Was he waddling his way down to the river, perhaps, when the irresistible smell of our garage wafted across the field, into the woods, and drew him like a magnet?

In any case, we are at war again.  This time, however, we will not fool around with humane traps, hardware cloth or sprigs of mint, but will go straight for deadly force:  Grandma Rube's pheasant-hunting gun.  But first, of course, we have to be made aware of the creature's presence, which means once again rigging up the motion detector that will turn a radio on in the house.  Which means extension cords snaking through the kitchen, and the radio coming on every time a butterfly flits by.  It also means keeping the gun in readiness by the front door, and hiding it when anybody comes to the house.  And it means a killing, which, however justified, is never less than awful.

Somebody once wrote that the peace of the countryside is an urban myth.  So true.

We Are Now At War

...with the porcupine who is trying to demolish our garage.  We have tried peaceful, low-tech strategies, to wit:

1. Wrapping the garage post in hardware cloth.  He has chewed holes through this, and inflicted major damage.

2. Purchasing and baiting (with yummy salted apple slices) a humane trap, which he has ignored.

3. Threading sprigs of mint through the hardware cloth.  This disconcerted him for a couple of nights, but then he returned with a vengeance.

Now my ingenious spouse has rigged up a motion detector that will turn on a radio in the house whenever something or someone approaches the garage.  He has oiled and loaded a gun that hasn't been used since he killed a pheasant in 1977.  Tonight we will watch and wait, and tomorrow I will let you know the outcome.

On a more idyllic note, the baby wrens must have hatched, since there are now two birds rushing in and out of the wren house with tidbits.  They (the parents) are so tiny, and they work so hard.  And instead of saving precious energy, they twitter every time they perch on the nearby gutter.  I wish I could set out some comfort food for them:  grits or oatmeal or something.  But wrens like a challenge, and the food they bring home has to be wild-caught, and just the right size.

More Tales Of The Porcupine

Last night we were visited again by our porcupine.  Maybe the unseasonal heat and humidity had made him irritable, but this time he chewed through the hardware cloth which my husband had wrapped around the post of the garage to protect it.  Through the holes that he ripped in the mesh, our porcupine made significant progress towards his goal of eating the garage post.  Were you under the impression that a porcupine's quills are his only significant weapon?  Apparently he has quite a set of teeth as well, on top of an indomitable will.

At dinner with an herbalist friend, we told her our problem.  She said that wild creatures in general hate the smell and taste of aromatic plant essences, such as mint.  Fortunately, we have enough mint (pepper-, apple-, orange-, and lemon balm) to deter an army of undesirables, so this evening my husband picked a bunch, and threaded it into the remains of the hardware cloth. 

Those herbs attached to the weather beaten post make me think of the wayside shrines you sometimes saw in Europe--located in spots consecrated in turn to nameless earth spirits, Druid divinities, Roman goddesses, and the Virgin Mary--and which the rustic passersby would honor with a handful of aromatic herbs, or a bouquet of wildflowers.

Will the power of mint do the job that the humane trap and the hardware cloth failed at, and keep our porcupine-chewed garage from collapsing?  I'll let you know.

Porcupine Redux

When I looked outside this morning, it was evident that the porcupine had been about.  Carefully skirting the pieces of salted apple leading up to the trap, he had walked around the trap, ignored the apples within, and taken several sizable chunks out of the garage post.

With so many trees around, what is it about the garage post that he likes so much? 

In the basement, the baby hens are prospering, sprouting real feathers at the tips of their little wings.  They have warmth, food, and water.  They are certainly not stressed.  But I cannot help thinking how much more interesting their life would be--and how much smarter they would turn out--if they could toddle around on the grass behind their mother as she pointed out a bug here, a nice weed there, and instructed them from dawn to dusk on the basics of being a chicken.

Porcupine, Continued

Two nights ago, I saw him.  I was driving the truck up the driveway after dinner out with a friend, and there he was, glued to the post between the two garage doors, chewing away.

My husband has been repainting the bottom of that post, then covering it with wire mesh, for the last couple of years.  And now the beast was standing on his hind legs and  gnawing on the unprotected wood above the mesh.

I shined the brights right at him, but he continued to chew.  Eventually, he turned his head slowly and looked in my direction.  This guy was nothing like Beatrix Potter's Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, who wore an apron and a frilled cap, and was a laundress.  (In fact, Mrs. T. was a hedgehog rather than a porcupine.)  Our porcupine wore a face full of gray whiskers, and an aggrieved look.  It took him a few seconds to digest the circumstances before he lumbered off with an opposum-like waddle in the direction of the woods.

I must confess that in those few seconds, I had a fantasy of gunning the engine and running him over....

Instead, tonight, having consulted  the WWW, we set out a humane trap baited with chunks of raw apple dipped in salt.  With luck, he'll be waiting for us in the morning with a bellyful of salty apple and we'll put him in the car and relocate him to a stretch of woods somewhere.

Then we'll go back home and repaint the garage post, and hope that our porcupine was a bachelor.