Yes, I was in battle again. A persistent skunk that wants to take up residence in the crawl space. I got rid of it last week, having found one place it broke in. This involved a lot of crawling around on my belly armed with a headlamp (not pictured – this is an old picture) and curses. I’ve done this before… It left. Then yesterday I found a new place it had broken in through and the battle was rejoined. Interestingly, this time it decided to hide after some of the back and forth and I lost track of it for a good while and was about to give up and hope it will feel unsafe with all the lights I’d put on down there (and/or encourage it further to leave by deploying nuclear weapons to match the ones it comes armed with*).
In preparation for this I left open the large access hatch and sprinkled a layer of flour in front of it to detect when the beast leaves, presumably later at night. (The risk is that it leaves and another or several others move in to replace it…) But I did not have to escalate things after all (or do the risky wait). In doing one last check under there (it takes a lot of effort since you cannot move down there save for crawling on your belly) I spotted a tiny bit of its tail that it had not hidden well, betraying its hiding place. Lots of light-flashing and gravel-throwing later, it left (confirmed by one-way tracks).
This is not really how I want to spend my time.
-cvj
*Ammonium hydroxide. See here.
The Never-ending war…
The long war with Fluffy et al continues… moves, countermoves, battles won and lost.. I sense a Zager and Evans ballad will be written to chronicle this for all history
Raul Aaron Scout liked this on Facebook.
Louis Douglas Jacobs liked this on Facebook.
Ah. I remember this well….
Clifford, the only thing you need is a black female cat and a little white paint you know …
Indeed. I am at constant war with the squirrels, my most detested foe (speaking as a gardener).
Penny Little Hawks liked this on Facebook.
I have a friend in Taos who pulled up a flagstone in her garden to fine a litter of five or six baby skunks. Hard to find anyone to take them in and hard to find homes for skunks. I’m not sure what happened except that it was an epic adventure but it all came out OK, everyone happy.
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Skunks are pesky critters, but grey squirrel can be worse. I once had a problem with one which made repeated attacks on my plastic food containers (nuts, biscuits, cereal, etc) to the extent that after I had weighted down the lids with books to prevent it opening them, it started to gnaw through the plastic, covering my counter top in little scraps of plastic! It also had a penchant for cuppa soup packets for some strange reason…
A headlamp? I’d have thought your nose would be sufficient!
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Sounds like this was a skunkworks project, in more than one way.
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You’re almost certainly correct.
If you ever get arrested, this is the picture the papers will use …
There’s a joke in here somewhere about how does a physicist fight a skunk.