A Tale of Fierce Creatures for Shrewd Observers

A Tale of Fierce Creatures for Shrewd Observers by rscholz@comcast.net

Turning my garage into a workshop/office area has been a fun project. I am at least 80% done, which, if it were a programming project would mean I have about 80% left to complete, or so. Or at least that has been my experience.

Once upon a time my 90-year-old garage had a rusty and decrepit metal door which would never shut properly so, naturally, little creatures liked to hide from the cold inside. One Spring a happy little Carolina Wren nested on a shelf at the back of the garage and flew past me whenever I came in. Yes, for many years my garage provided shelter for mice and chipmunks and even a raccoon or two... Sheesh!

I've added a nice front door and windows to the garage so the front entrance is secure. As part of my garage fix up project I've torn apart and rebuilt the garage walls, particularly along the bottom where little creatures had fashioned multiple cute little entrances.

Consequently I have almost completely eliminated the entrance points for all the creatures that like using the garage as shelter for raising their families and generally living the high life.

Almost. There are still some mice so I have a couple of mouse traps in the garage. Once or twice a week a mouse is tempted by the peanut butter in the TomCat Trap and takes a one way trip to Mouse Heaven.

Ironically, I place the mouse trap so that it will be easy to see under an LED lamp which includes an ultrasonic pest repeller guaranteed to repel all rodents in a 400 square foot area around it.

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Doesn't say much for the "Sonic Rodent Repeller" that mice seem to ignore it, but one whiff of peanut butter and mice apparently lose their minds and throw caution to the winds. Death often ensues, it's inexplicable.

Maybe the ineffectiveness of this device explains why, when I bought it at Home Depot, it was marked down from $14 to less than $4.

My new favorite mouse trap is called the "TomCat - Press 'n Set".

Those jaws do look a bit sharp; but on one occasion they snapped down on a chipmunk's head and they didn't even break the little fellow's skin. Having a mouse trap on his head disoriented Mr. Munk but I must have found him soon after the trap got him 'cause I opened the trap and he scampered away.

That's the prologue. Here's the weirdness. It's a tiny bit gruesome... sorry. It's almost impossible to tell a story about mice being caught in the Jaws of Death without including a little bit of gore so this part of the story has an apology for a preface.

On Sunday I noticed that my TomCat Trap had caught a mouse. It was a little mouse and the trap literally cut the pint sized dude in half... Yoiks! I picked up the trap and disposed of the front half of the mouse by throwing it into the brush on the other side of the stone wall that separates our yard from the park next door. I like to think of this as "feeding the neighborhood cats." As I was coming back from this unpleasant errand I noticed a faucet dripping on the side of our house. Getting the faucet to stop dripping took a bit of trouble and I forgot about the back half of the mouse waiting for me in the garage.

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A couple hours later I remembered the back half of Mickey ("A Derriere To Remember" would be an apt movie title, eh?) and went back to clean up the arrears (backlog?).

To my amazement Mickey's nether region (consisting of his two rear feet, butt and tail), WERE NOWHERE TO BE FOUND! How weird, I thought. What creature in my garage would have any interest in half a mouse? I guess if you're a mouse eater, half a mouse is better than none. There are occasionally some cats who wander through our yard and a raccoon family used to live in my next door neighbor's woebegone garage, but my garage is much too weather tight now to allow such big creatures inside. It was a mystery... or even a "puzzlement" as the King of Siam liked to say... hmmm.

Side note: Yul Brynner as the King of Siam was a handsome if somewhat "scary" looking man, I must say. Coincidentally, did you notice that the "puzzlement" he is pondering in this photo has something to do (perhaps) with the TomCat mousetrap on his piano? I'll bet those drafty old castles had big-time problems with mice and such.

Three days later, around 9 in the morning, I was getting ready to take my wife to a dentist in Clarkston Mi. I had re-baited the trap and put it in exactly the same place in the garage. Just before leaving I decided to check to see if the trap had done its work. It had. An average sized field mouse was fixed securely (rendered inoperative?) in the TomCat's Jaws of Death. My wife was waiting in the car so I left the trap where it was, vowing to give the little guy an appropriate funeral (if being tossed over the stone wall could be considered "appropriately" reverential) after we returned from Clarkston.

Three hours later we were back home again and I went out to the garage to

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funeralize the latest dead Mickey. Imagine my surprise, chagrin, shock and.. is horror the right word? Yes Horror, when I discovered that my dead Mickey and the TomCat Trap were gone, gone, gone. Vanished without a trace!

Vanished you might say, like the slightest hint of integrity in a room full of politicians once money is mentioned... Yoiks! What fresh hell is this? What carnivorous creature is living in my garage? And, this carnivorous creature is substantial enough to make off with a dead mouse AND the trap that killed it?

Yoiks!

And that's where matters stood as of yesterday morning.

All was revealed yesterday afternoon and I was quite surprised to find out just who loved mice so much, for dinner, that is. Shrewd observers of natural phenomenon may have already guessed.

It was a shrew! A Northern Short tailed Shrew to be exact. In addition to eating mice, shrews like peanut butter too. Maybe they even like mouse-and-peanutbutter sandwiches.

Creatures often like weird food combinations. For example, Elvis liked peanut butter and banana sandwiches... grilled. Anyways, it was a love of peanut butter that brought the shrew to my TomCat Trap which simultaneously broke its little neck and solved the mystery of the disappearing mice.

So I've been thinking a lot about shrews and, of course, Googling feverishly so as to help me better understand the weirdness going on in my garage.

Shrews are unbelievably fierce!

A shrew’s life is a constant search for prey. Many species must eat their body weight’s worth of food each day. (I advise you not to attempt this one). If a shrew doesn’t eat within a few hours, it dies. This constant need for food has led to some truly bizarre and even disturbing adaptations.

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The shrew lacks hollow fangs (as in venomous snakes) but instead has a gland that allows saliva to flow with the venom. When the shrew encounters its prey – often an invertebrate, but it can also be a mouse or other vertebrate – it begins biting it, allowing the venomous saliva to flow into the wound.

For the prey, this is the beginning of a very bad day.

The venom paralyzes the creature, but keeps it very much alive. The shrew can then move it to a cache, available for whenever hunting is not going so great.

For an animal that has to eat constantly, this keeps a fresh if unsavory meal always at the ready.

And here's another interesting fact about shrews...

While it may appear small and gray, shrews are one of the most voracious mammalian predators on the planet. And they’re abundant and widespread, found on five continents in a variety of habitats. In the United Kingdom, there are an estimated 50 shrews per hectare in woodlands, with a country-wide population of more than 40 million shrews. The northern short-tailed shrew may be the most common mammal of the eastern United States.

I'm not a big fan of having "pets." But live-catching a shrew and then trying to keep one of them alive and happy with lots of food sounds like it might be a fun challenge.

They eat as much as they weigh, every day! That alone would make the care and feeding of a short tailed shrew a very participatory sport. Almost sounds like fun.

The “Taming of the Shrew” would be an apt title for the next round of this play, wouldn't you say?

So, mystery solved: shrews, one of the "most voracious mammalian predators on the planet" have been robbing my mousetraps for sustenance... Wow! ### END ###

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