If you happen to be a dues paying member of PETA, you might as well stop reading this right now. I am not trying to make anyone mad at me. I do love animals. Animals of all kinds. They fascinate me. I am not a proponent of randomly killing animals either, but there are times in life you have to choose. Me, or him.
When we moved to Oklahoma from New Mexico, I was very naive about the wildlife here. I grew up with deer, antelope, elk, bear, wild cats, tarantulas, porcupines and snakes.
Most of those animals want nothing to do with people.
I never saw an opossum before moving here. I never saw an armadillo. The only skunk I saw was dead on the highway.
I never knew wild animals who had no fear of humans. Sometimes I feel if these animals had fingers they would be flipping me off.
When looking to buy property, we found what we thought was the perfect place to make our home.
Five wooded acres on the edge of what once was the KT Railroad depot.
No one had ever lived on this piece of land and it hadn’t been used since this line of the railroad shut down in the 1950’s.
The old cotton weigh station still stands.
“What a great piece of history,” we thought. I remember my grandmother talking of riding the train from Carney to Tryon. How cool was that.
What I did not know, is that the railroad closing was not the end of the story.
Over the years, people had used the railroad bed as a dump and with many places to hide, the property was overrun with copperheads.
I like snakes, but stepping out of my front door to be greeted by some little snake with an attitude was too much.
We declared war. In three years, we cleared the trash out of the railroad cut and exterminated a large number of copperheads.
We won.
Or did we?
What we won was the battle. The wildlife was going to rally the troops and come back at us with a vengeance.
We erected a chicken coop and with that, we did not realize we had opened the equivalent of an all-you-can-eat buffet for little creatures.
ARRGH! As Charlie Brown would say.
The fun was just starting.
All sorts of animals came out of that railroad cut to dine at the Coop Cafe. Raccoons, skunks and opossum love eggs and chicken. Snakes have a special liking for eggs. Rats and mice like the chicken feed. We bought live traps and rat poison. Placed golfballs in the nesting boxes for snakes to swallow and choke on and rethought our fencing strategies.
We can slow the flow but they keep on coming.
This winter, the nasty little things have turned to a new battlefield and guerrilla warfare. We are fighting the war on two fronts.
They have turned my porch and patio into a rodent superhighway. They are afraid of nothing. It began one night with a raccoon crawling over my leg to get to the cat food bowl. I thought it was one of the cats.
When I looked down, I jumped, the chair went flying, I screamed, and the raccoon calmly went on to the food source to eat. We stopped feeding the cats out there.
Then came the skunks. Battle armor on and guns loaded.
They figured out how to get under the house from the porch. If we happen to be entering or exiting the house, those black and white warriors break out their weapon of choice and cut loose.
So far we have avoided direct hits.
Where in the heck do they keep coming from? Live trap is holding his defensive position successfully and the .22 is successfully dispatching the enemy, and yet they still come.
I won’t give up. J. D. and I will keep the live trap baited and the gun loaded, and we will keep the fight going.
This is Oklahoma, and we will stand our ground.