In addition to the occasional person trying to pound through our back door at 3:00 a.m. (see previous post), our urban environment is filled with a number of other interesting creatures.
To begin with, we live in an old house and are not entirely rodent-tight. We also are not above poisoning the little critters. Because of this, once every two or three years in the fall, we will go into the basement or open a closet door and be hit with the telltale smell of bad sauerkraut, indicative of a decomposing rodent. There is nothing to do about this except let the smell play itself out since the corpse is likely in the walls or floorboards. We’ve observed that it takes a remarkably long time for something with such little body mass to decompose.
We also recently experienced our first winged rodent. I had just returned home on a late flight from a full day of travel and had settled into bed to read. It was after midnight, Laura was already asleep, and I heard a sort of thump, thump, thump sound. We were in the middle of some remodeling (and by some I mean pretty much replacing the roofing, siding, eaves, and soffits on our house). So I thought I was hearing some sort of construction material blowing in the breeze and hitting the side of the house. However, for exterior flapping, the sound seemed remarkably close – as in a few feet away. I sat up abruptly, looking in the direction of the sound and waking Laura up in the process. Just as I did so, the bat flew out from behind a dresser and proceeded to swoop and dive around our bedroom – paying special attention to our bed. Laura, half awake, was still trying to sort out what was going on, but near as I could tell, it was my fault.
Or at least it was my problem to solve. Leaving Laura and the bat to their own devices, I threw on some pants, ran downstairs and out to the garage for the trusty tennis racket. By the time I returned, Laura had decided that she could be of no assistance and was buried under her pillows. Figuring I only had one good shot, I waited for the bat to zoom by me and gave it my best spike. The bat careened off our bathroom vanity (yes, our bathroom and bedroom are part of one large room) and conveniently came to rest in the sink. I’m not sure it was dead, but it was clearly immobilized. Enough so that I was able to gather it up and bring it downstairs. If I hadn’t sounded the “all clear” upon my return, I think Laura would still be under her pillows.
Our sincere hope is that the bat was a one-time construction-related event.
Most of the rest of our wildlife is outside. We have three raccoons that regularly visit our yard at night. No problem unless we are arriving late and have to walk from the garage to the house. We’ve never actually been attacked, but have been hissed at, as the raccoons apparently feel some ownership over that nighttime real estate. I honestly couldn’t tell you if they were present to witness my running to the garage and returning with a tennis racket.
There are more rabbits than people in the neighborhood, often taking up residence under our porch or chomping our shrubs, leaving plenty of fertilizer behind. This fall I also saw a fox in the middle of the street munching a dead squirrel. He refused to move as I drove by – I think I saw him shrug his shoulders as if to say, “yeah, what are you looking at?”
For the last year or so, Laura and I also have heard rooster sounds. We first noticed them during the winter as we were reading in our living room. The “cock-a-doodle-doos” seemed far away – maybe down the next block, where some enterprising person was taking up urban farming.
As spring approached and we started to open windows, the sound seemed closer, maybe across the street or a half block away.
Finally, as we got outside and started our spring chores, we realized the rooster was much closer than we thought — in fact as close as our neighbors’ basement. We have neighbors who are first generation American immigrants from Southeast Asia. Their notion of urban farming, while a bit surprising, seems entirely logical if you want to keep a rooster alive through the cold, long, Minnesota winter.
The sound has been gone for about a month – I’m assuming the rooster was tasty. Or maybe it escaped into our rafters, only to meet an untimely and possibly smelly end.