Wild Kingdom

I am well accustomed to handling all manner of pests and beasties. Spiders? No problem – I just grab a paper towel, squeeze, and flush. Anything smaller, I go barehanded. Last summer – I fished DOZENS of dead mice/moles/frogs from the skimmer baskets of the pool, and had to use a large net and garbage bag to remove an ENORMOUS (also dead) opossum. I removed 1 half-drowned chickadee by hand (and nursed it to health). In my old house I chased a bat around my living room/dining room/kitchen for an hour, trying to shoo it out, before accidentally hitting it with the broom. I ended up having to mercy kill it, and it still bothers me. This year however, the beasties are upping the ante considerably.

During the coldest snap last winter, in the middle of the night (I was up with my newborn for a 2AM feeding) I saw a large mouse in my kitchen. Although it pains me to kill (seriously I wept about the bat) I set the traps and removed a pair of carcasses the next day. I mean geesh, all I could think about was them crawling all over my baby while he slept – it had to be done. This Spring I started hearing scurrying in my attic. More mice? Not so fast. I carefully pulled down the trap door in the ceiling and crept up the ladder with my flashlight. Fan-fucking-tastic, a family of squirrels. Long story short, the exterminator was $450 and said they MUST kill their catches, the live-trap was $20, plus the cost of the peanut butter and apple to bait it. I caught them one at a time, drove them to the wild-animal shelter in the next town. I also laid stomach down under the eaves with my face hovering over the nasty nest they made in the insulation and nailed into place the special metal plate I fashioned to block the huge hole they chewed in my roof. Go me.

So this morning, when I stepped out the front door, baby in arms, to take him to daycare, I can’t say I was overly surprised by what I saw. At first I just heard startled rustling from under my front porch. I swung around to catch a glimpse of…a stray dog? Hmmm. I stashed the baby in the car (and YES left him there alone for a minute) while I went back for a closer look at, a HUGE coyote. Great. A call to the police department basically told me there’s nothing they can do, I left a voicemail for the “animal control” officer, but his message was very clear that he would only remove animals that were “double bagged and left on the curb”. So….does anyone know what I should bait a coyote trap with? Chrissakes, I live in suburbia, WTF?