For the past few weeks, we’ve been hearing scratches and bumps coming from under the house near the kitchen. My first thought was that our mice were back again, so based on that I placed a non-lethal trap in the kitchen near the noise and waited. When a week went by and no mouse took me up on the tasty crunchy peanut butter (it’s gotta be crunchy: the smooth stuff is poison to mice), I began to wonder what I was dealing with.
Around the time the noise started, we realized the wood damange to the front of our garage wasn’t simple rot but in fact termites. The damage they did was minimal and the site seems to have been dormant for a while but just for some peace of mind we called in an exterminator to set some termite traps. When the sales guy finished checking the crawlspace he had a curious comment.
“Is this the cat that’s been wandering around under the house? Bad kitty!” he joked as he dusted himself off.
“Excuse me?” I replied, perplexed.
“Oh I found some cat droppings under the house. Looks like something’s nesting down there, down by the kitchen area from the looks of the insulation.”
Hmm. We keep our crawlspace closed. How could anything get in there, I wondered.
Another week went by and I was planting bushes on the south side of the house. I noticed what appeared to be fresh cat droppings near the flowerbed I was digging, but something wasn’t quite right: cats bury their droppings and this was out in the open. I put it out of my mind and continued on with the other things I had to do.
Two weeks ago I cleaned up our garden area behind the house. To my astonishment, a cat-sized hole had been dug under the air duct leading into the house. Fresh claw marks were clearly visible in the mud.
Aha! The door of our uninvited house guest! Thinking I’d close the hole and deal with the consequences later, I piled the hole full of nearby, golf-ball-sized rocks and covered it with a brick step. That should do it, I thought.
The next morning I was even more astonished to find that every single rock had vanished! What’s more, a neat little tunnel had been dug from the existing hole to the other side of the brick step. A pile of leaves cleverly hid the entrance of the new tunnel.
I’m dealing with a worthy adversary, I thought to myself. I piled even more bricks on top of the new tunnel and considered it closed again. We went on Thanksgiving vacation with the hole sealed.
When we got back the scratching and bumps were still there, only they took on a more desperate sound. Yesterday offered me a chance to go under the house and investigate. Droppings were present around the corners of the house. Insulation was pulled down in places, often with leaves piled on top: nests! The metal screen of a vent opening had been shredded with the metal pulled inside – an effort to escape. I shook the leaves out of the insulation and carefully tucked it back into place, moving around the whole crawlspace in about an hour. Satisfied with my work and seeing no critters, I dusted myself off and went back inside.
Last night Kelly and I were watching a movie when the scratching returned. I leapt off the couch, grabbed the flashlight and ran outside, shining the light around the foot of the house. Two beady eyes glowed at me from behind a vent opening under the kitchen. Our mystery guest turned out to be an opossum.
As he wandered off the ledge of the vent and back into the depths of the crawlspace, I devised a plan to free him. A removed vent cover on the far side of the house was balanced so that it was easy to open from the inside and would indicate when it was used as a door. At the end of our movie, I walked outside to find it lying on the ground: the opossum was out! I replaced the vent cover and went to bed with the hope that the critter was gone for good. I’m not crossing my fingers, though.
From what I’ve read yesterday, !opossums are non-destructive critters who move slowly and are not at all aggressive. I suppose if we had to have something crawl into the house, its better that its an opossum than a raccoon or skunk. The challenge now is to keep the crawlspace secure through the upcoming mating season in January.
Ah, the joys of living on the edge of town!