I grew up in the 1950’s in New York City, in the outer borough of Queens if that counts as NYC. Despite popular assumptions about the urban environment, vermin were not much of a presence in my house or neighborhood.
No rats. No cockroaches. We did have disease-carrying pigeons nesting under the el, feral cats slinking through the alleys and predatory teenagers infesting the next block, just like the gangs in West Side Story, with all of the viciousness but none of the music or romance. (Speaking of pestilence, I won’t mention that Queens is the birthplace of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.)
However, it wasn’t until I moved to Hopewell in 1978 that I encountered real vermin.
In Hopewell we had not just a mouse in the house but great herds of mice in the attic and basement, so many that for years I have been in competition with a friend as to who has caught more rodents in our have-no-heart traps.
Worse than innumerable mice in the house was the squeaky invasion by a single shorttail shrew. The cats kept their distance from this four-inch monster. Its saliva is poisonous.
I was willing to co-exist with the shrew until I discovered that one of the drawers in my tool cabinet was full of shrew poo. That was the end of peaceful coexistence along with the life of the creature which I managed to crush in a have-no-heart trap baited with the very cat food that was maintaining this mini-Godzilla.
Outside the house I was confronted with a different struggle. Where I planted green beans, rabbits attacked. One day I had seedlings. The next day I had stumps. Chasing the rabbits with a stick and screaming provided exercise to me but did little to discourage the rabbity depredation.
Unreasonable legal restrictions prevented me from acquiring a bazooka, the only truly effective device for eliminating rabbits. So I decided to buy a slingshot. To my shock, I discovered that slingshots are illegal in New Jersey. If such regulations had been in effect in earlier times, David would never have become king, and Goliath would be alive today.
One year, my garden was besieged by a woodchuck. I borrowed a have-some-heart trap, caught the beast, and “took it for a ride” as they used to say in 30’s gangster movies. Before I caught the woodchuck, I caught a squirrel and a raccoon and considered opening a suburban menagerie and charging admission to subsidize the rabbit fencing I finally bought.
Coincidentally, just two weeks ago, I trapped a raccoon in my attic. Like Luca Brasi in a more recent gangster film, Mr. Raccoon now sleeps with the fishes.
I did not even attempt to do anything about the ubiquitous squirrels, known among The Haters as tree rats, which dug up and ate my tulip bulbs. I was briefly charmed when an elusive flying squirrel settled in my birdhouse. Then I found out that they carry typhus.
Typhus!
Fairly high on my enemies list are catbirds, ornithological meowers that descend from the trees, to methodically consume my raspberries. They’d start out slowly then spread the berry good news to their birdy friends. Where I used to harvest gallons of berries, I am now lucky to get a few quarts. I considered napalm until I found a nonlethal approach online: Buy pinwheels and rubber snakes at the dollar store and plant both among the berry bushes.
The dollar store was enriched. The catbirds ignored the pinwheels and perched on the snakes.
Most loathsome of all local, and national, plagues, are the execrable deer, despoilers of landscaping, destroyers of automobiles and distributors of Lyme disease. Even though fresh carcasses line the roadways every morning, their numbers increase. Misguided deer-huggers who admire the beasts’ grace and sometimes even feed these hoofed vermin sometimes admit there are too many and come up with the most novel, and inefficient, methods of population control: vasectomies, hysterectomies, condoms and counseling.
Three years back, a deer ran into the side of my car, survived the impact and ran off with an antler on one side of its head and my side-view mirror on the other.
Rumor is that Disney’s excruciatingly cute cartoon deer, Bambi, is the reason why venison is not available in every store. I sneer at such sentimental twaddle. Once a year, Jeff-the-Hunter presents me with a freshly shot cervid that goes into my freezer and provides me with a year’s worth of healthy, lean Bambi-burgers replacing artery-clogging beef.
But my eating one deer a year won’t resolve the plague. There is only one answer— wolves! It’s now time to enroll in Hopewell’s new Adopt-a-Wolf program providing each neighborhood with its own howling pack that will finally keep those cloven-hoofed horrors in check. All contributions are tax deductible.
Robin Schore lives in Titusville.
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