Bear with me, this is a long one and ends with a bang.
More and more, the critters are coming out of hiding around here. I still haven’t had a a lot of contact with the four legged world, but there have been some sightings of life.
I have seen bear scat piles on my property but no bears. And the other day, I was walking down the road to the brook and a deer came bounding out, saw me, did a complete about face, and completely disappeared so much so that I wondered if it was actually a ghost deer. But I’ve gotten in the habit of singing outloud or humming while I walk around alone to warn anyone of my presence and I often hear rustling in the trees.
At night, the sky fills with the twinkling of fireflies. Only once before have a seen fireflies and I continue to think they are one of the most magical beings alive. Except when you see them in the day and you realize they really are just bugs and look all buggy.
The moths are kind of cool in a fuzzy bodied sort of way as long as they stay in the distance but i also love to hear the gentle hum of bumblebees as they bounce from flower to flower. I didn’t actually realize that there are bees actually called “bumblebees” until moving here. I thought that was just a cute name we called all bees. But come to find out, they are the big giant fuzzy bees you see in flowers and I kind of love them (again, as long as they keep their distance).
Each morning, the day greets us with an incredibly early sunrise and a full orchestra of birds. I can’t begin to tell you how many birds are out here. But it’s far more than I’ve ever encountered in the suburbs. Each one has their own unique call and I have no idea who says what but I enjoy picking out the differences.
I saw my first realife frog in my garden! He was cute and hoppy and had no interest in letting me catch him. But then I learned he was actually a toad which doesn’t sound as cute as a frog. But he was still cute in a not froggy sort of way.
Everything appeared to be settling naturally in our little farmhouse. One day, I was working in my vegetable garden and I looked over at the nearby haunted shed/stable and saw a little woodchuck peeking out at me. He took one look at me and ran under the shed, not having any interest in hanging out with me.
The next day, I went back to the garden and saw him again. This time I was far stealthier and tiptoed up slowly and snapped a picture. The picture was from far away and it was kind of a darker area so I zoomed in on the woodchuck and brightened it. That was when I noticed there were actually TWO woodchucks. I thought to myself, how cute! And they didn’t appear to be touching my garden, so I didn’t worry about them.
So at that point I took Donovan out to show him and we snuck up quiet like to watch. Except this time 4 little heads poked out from below the stable. So it turned out we had a full on woodchuck family.
The next day, I decided I wanted a picture of this little family, so I brought out my phone, positioned it, and held very still.
And watched.
1…2…3…4…5…6 heads popped out! 5 babies and the mom. That’s when I started to wonder if maybe this is something I should worry about.
At this point, I started noticing that my poor vegetables were getting helplessly devoured by slugs. They were everywhere. Slime trails all over, slugs on leaves, I moved mulch and there were entire slug families underneath. In a couple days they had completely destroyed my garden.
So I did what every determined gardener would do in this situation. Went to war.
I bought slug deterrent. I sprinkled it everywhere. I went plant by plant, plucking off slugs and yeeting them farther than their little slimy bodies expected I could yeet. I was determined to not be bettered by something that didn’t even have a vertebrae. And then I spent way too much money buying new plants to take the place of the ones that were destroyed.
And all the while, the little woodchuck family watched me from under the shed. Never once bothering the garden. Afterall, I had a fence with a trench and buried fencing. No one was getting in this thing.
And then, one morning, I woke and walked to my vegetable garden. And beheld a scene of pure murder and mayhem. Those woodchucks had made an all-you-can-eat buffet of my garden and they ate like your cheap uncle who piles a mountain of food on his plate because he wants to “get his money’s worth”. They ate it all. My lettuce. My peas. My tomatoes. My beans. total destruction.
And yet, there was still no digging around my garden. Apparently the mama was sending her minions out to forage in my garden because the little vermin were small enough to fit through the fence holes. Then they brought their goods back to mom and were like “look mama! we are good little woodchucks and brought you all the food you could possibly eat and more.” And then the mom called them good little woodchucks and gave them all pie or something.
I turned to my garden facebook group to plead for help. Most said to shoot them. Like I was some monster who would come barreling into this little family with my shotgun (which doesn’t exist) and shoot a mother and her 5 babies in cold blood. I send bugs back out into the wild, I’m nowhere near the type to kill an animal, let alone babies.
Some others said to trap them and release them elsewhere. I had a live trap (more on that later), but how the heck do you catch 6 woodchucks in one trap? I certainly wasn’t going to scatter the family all over. People can be cruel!
And then someone said that the only way to deter them was with male urine from men over hormonal age. Well, that was a thought. I had a couple of those around the house! I asked Calvin if he would pee in my garden and he flat out said no and walked away (teenagers are so difficult, amIright?). So I asked Tyler if he would and he said “All those woodchucks are going to attack me while I pee on them!” and I told him that wasn’t true because he wasn’t peeing on the woodchucks so they would only attack him while he was peeing around the garden.
Several other suggestions were made so I decided to go to the hardware store to see what they had.
Except apparently every garden owner in the area must have h ad a family o f woodchucks because everything was completely sold out. I asked someone for help and ended up with a kid who tried to sell me an indoor sound deterrent for mice. And I was like, do you even know what a woodchuck is? I left with the last two Marigolds (apparently they don’t like Marigolds and it was suggested to plant them around the garden) and a bag of Moth balls. So, once again, it was war.
I planted the two Marigolds by the gate (which will do nothing but I felt good trying), then a sprinkled moth balls all around the perimeter (which I keep calling malt balls even though they are totally different and malt balls are delish, moth balls are not). And then I made a witchy concoction of garlic cloves and red pepper, let them sit in warm water until vampires in the next county wouldn’t even come near my house with the smell, and sprayed it all over my plants.
The next day, the sun was warm and beating down on my garden and I was greeted with a smell that would wake the dead. But no visible signs of munching on my plants. So I continue with this regimen as long as it appears to work.
Now about that trap.
So, one morning we noticed that something with obvious opposable thumbs was opening the hatch of our compost and pulling out our egg shells. We also found egg shells in our barn. But it wasn’t until we found large holes around the base of the house, chewing straight through the wood, that we started thinking we should do something about this.
Enter my pest hero, Shay. She pokes around, checks things out, peeks in holes, smashes a couple wasps nest WITH HER FOOT and other things badass pest ladies do that I wouldn’t even come close to doing. And she decides it must be a raccoon.
So, she sets up a trap near one of the holes. Just one because apparently if you block all of them, raccoons get smart and just don’t come out until they die (which really doesn’t sound that smart at all) and then I have a dead raccoon under my house and that’s an even bigger problem.
She baited the trap with a can of cat food. it’s fresh. it’s stinky, raccoons dig this stuff.
The next morning I go to check the trap and it’s been tossed. Trap sprung, cat food everywhere, trap thrown to the side, no raccoon.
So shay comes back, baits it again with another can of cat food, and this time anchors it down.
That day, we had a big rainstorm. When the rain cleared, Tyler went out and came back in and was like “we caught something!”
That something was a black and white cat. Soaked through, scared, but not hungry because it ate both cans of cat food clean. So we released it and set the trap again, this time baiting it with egg shells because cats don’t like eggshells and raccoons do.
Each day we set the trap, baited it with egg shells. And each day that trap was sprung, eggshells were crushed or gone, and no raccoon.
Then one day they weren’t gone. No sign of raccoon. I thought maybe he got tired of egg shells so I put an entire egg in there.
Well, that egg has now been in there for 2 weeks and we haven’t had any raccoon action. And nobody wants to go near it because 2 week old egg. But t he only things we can think is that the raccoon ran into his demise or got caught elsewhere.
And that brings us to today. With the real kicker.
I started the day off running across a spider in the house that was, I swear to god, the size of the palm of my hand. Well, to be honest, it was dead (thank you cat) and curled up, but at its curled up size, you could totally tell it was the size of my hand palm in real life. And I’ve seen crazy big spiders around here which are almost as scary as the ticks I’m so terrified of that I wear overalls outside because I’m afraid ticks will crawl in my buttcrack and I’ll get lyme disease and have to tell the doctor a tick bit my buttcrack. But I am straying from the point.
After I torched the giant dead spider (I lie, it was tyler and he just picked it up with a tissue because it was already dead.), I went outside to start my gardening. Happily digging up bulbs to transfer, listening to my favorite true crime podcast, while Tyler went to go check the sprinklers in the lower field.
A moment later, sometime around when I was hearing about how the night stalker took his 5th victim, Tyler comes back and I smile at him but then I realize he has a bit of a strange look on his face. And I immediately thought “oh god what now?”
And that was when Tyler says to me “There’s a baby deer head on the path by the warehouse.”
Now, this took me a minute to understand. Because these are words you never expect to be in the same sentence (especially after listening to brutal murders). But soon it started to settle in. I calmly asked a few questions, still not forming reality around this thought. But what we had was the head of a baby deer, obviously chewed, no sign anywhere of a body of other bones, or even drag marks or a scuffle. Just the head.
What the what?
So, I do the only thing I can think to do when strange and bizarre things happen to me in Vermont. I call my neighbor. And I say “I don’t know where to start, or even what to ask, because this is just that weird.”
And she’s all, “start at the beginning and we’ll figure it out.”
“Tyler found a baby deer head on the path to the lower field.”
…Pause…
Despite the fact that this has never happened to her in the 40+ years she has lived here, she said it was likely the work of another animal but I should call the game warden just to let them know. She was also able to contact a neighbor who said they saw what appeared to be an eagle munching on a dear carcass a ways away so it was likely an eagle or large bird flying away with the head and dropped it mid flight. Because baby deer heads falling from the sky is apparently yet another fear I need to add to my growing list of strange and unusual fears.
I call the game warden and explain the situation to him. And this is the convo in brief:
Me: I found a baby deer head on my property. No body. no bones. Just the head.
Warden: is it fresh?
Me: very.
Warden: well, sometimes coyotes can kill the baby deers because they are easily susceptible to attack. And sometimes…and this is kind of horrific –
Me: I have a baby’s head on my property, we are past horrific.
Warden: yep. Well, sometimes the coyotes like to play with the head and kick it around like a ball.
Me: You sick, demented person. (okay, no I didn’t say this but god this is an awful picture to put in one’s head)
Warden: I wouldn’t worry about it too much. It’s just one so it doesn’t seem like poachers. But if you find more than one –
Me: If I find multiple heads on my property, I’m leaving.
Warden: yeah, probably. But call me before you go.
So those are the possibilities as to why I have a deer head on my path. Well, that or the theory that says some vengeful spirit or neighbor really didn’t want us to move in and tried to scare us off Godfather style but was fresh out of severed horse heads and had to settle for a baby deer head instead but dropped italong the way and didn’t notice until they got to our room and was like “well crap.” and left.
Regardless, we now have to bury a baby deer head in the woods like a friggin’ axe murderer.