It's October now and the weather here in Mexicali is getting cooler and more pleasant every day. I can once again enjoy the chance to sit out on my patio with a book and a cup of tea or a glass of wine, depending on what time it is and whether I'm looking forward to the day or recovering from it. The jasmine is blooming now and the air is heavy with its scent early in the morning or as the sun is setting. I have a fountain on a wall of my patio but I have to keep it empty unless I have the time to skim it daily for feathers. Yes, feathers. We have a plague of pigeons in our neighborhood and they never fail to think that the fountain is their personal spa when it's full of water. "Gee," you're thinking, "what's wrong with that? Can't the little birdies have some fun splashing and getting a drink? Aren't they fun to watch?" You might think so at first. And, in fact, it does take a little while to realize just how disgusting pigeons are when you have to live in close proximity to them. I had them nesting on my roof and on a window sill in the front of the house for the first year that I lived here. Finally, I had to get someone from work to come and clear them out and put strips of nails where they land on the house and rolls of chicken wire in the spaces where they were nesting to keep them out. But this was not before they had covered the front yard and the back patio with copious amounts of pigeon poop. We also have a neighbor who gets so frustrated with their constant cooing noises and nesting habits that he often spends his weekends hunting them down and shooting them from the rooftops. It's a little scary and I have found several of them bloody and dying in my yard and patio since he's been focused on reducing the population. I even came across one (evident by the gagging smell) that had crawled behind a cactus and died several days, at least, before I found it. I love animals and I have a special fondness for birds as pets. I've owned several parrots, including my favorite, Bongo, an African gray who is a much loved member of the family. But I confess to considering pigeons as something less than real birds. They are more like flying rodents. Thankfully, they are not nearly as much of a problem now as they once were. I still have to sweep up a couple of piles of feathers every week, but I can live with that.
Pigeons are not the only critters that I've had to deal with for the past couple of years. I spend my weekends in Long Beach, California, when I'm not commuting here to Mexicali for work. My husband and I have a house there on the edge of the city about 4 miles from the ocean. It's in the center of a huge metropolitan area, not far from a confluence of freeways, shopping centers and a big city park. The first critter problem we had was opossums. We had hordes of them over the span of about two years. At one point, we had one give birth to a litter of babies in our garage. I called the city's animal control department, hoping that they would help us to get rid of them. That was when I found out that they are protected animals and you can't do anything about them or to them, and the city won't help you at all. Their answer to the problem was "just leave your garage door open and eventually they will go away when they're ready." In the meantime, which turned out to be weeks, they stole the laundry for their nest, smelled up the gargage forever and made an unholy, nasty mess. So we bought a friendly trap and we proceeded to catch over 25 of them that we took to the park and released. A park ranger saw me once as I let an opossum out of the cage and he told me that it would be better if I didn't let him see me let "that poor little guy loose to get attacked by the mean crows in the park." Honestly, I don't believe even a crow would bother with an animal as unappealing as an opossum. Here is a link to a little video about someone who confused an opposum with a cat, which is hard to believe, but very funny. http://rocksoft.wordpress.com/2009/05/05/thats-not-a-cat-thats-a-possum/
After that, we thought we were finished with critter problems. Guess what? As soon as the opossum population went down, we had a bigger problem. Bigger, as in a bigger animal. Next we had raccoons. Now everyone knows that raccoons are cute little animals who are very smart and so clean that they even wash their their paws after they eat. Right. Their cute alright. But they are as big as a medium sized dog, with huge claws and a menacing attitude that is downright scary when you meet up with one or have one on its hind legs looking at you through your window almost at eye level. And they are so destructive that they almost made me wish to have the opossums back, even though they are stupid and smelly and annoying. At least they don't rip all your plants out by the roots to get at grubs and worms, destroy your garden and tip over all your potted plants on a daily basis. The opossums never got in the garage the day before Halloween and tore the wrappers off all the candy that was stored in a pantry cuboard and threw them and pieces of Baby Ruth and Snickers everywhere. We did notice, though, that the raccoons seemed to particularly enjoy the Snickers bars. . .
This year, the critters won't get any Halloween candy at our house. I hope any of you who read this and are ready to go Trick or Treating watch out for critters and don't feed the pigeons, the opossums or the raccoons.
