As you can probably tell if you’ve looked through my Wildlife photo gallery, I like watching birds. Among birds, I’m especially fond of woodpeckers. I’m not certain why. I guess generally speaking they’re just bizarre enough to be cool.

So it should come as no great surprise to learn that Vicki and I have filled the trees in and around our yard with woodpecker feeders. If you haven’t seen one, a woodpecker feeder is basically a little wire cage you strap to the tree, and then you put a block of suet inside of it. Woodpeckers love suet (which is just a form of congealed fat) and they poke their beak through the holes in the wire to eat it. The only downside to all of this being that blocks of the good suet (the kind the woodpeckers really groove on) are kind of expensive, and woodpeckers aren’t the only critters that like suet.

Squirrels for example, like suet – but squirrels aren’t a huge problem. When a squirrel develops a taste for suet, I grab a shotgun and blow the little bastard to hell. Simple and easy. But last December, in spite of prosecuting a long-term scorched earth campaign and eradicating most of the local tree rodent population, my woodpecker feeders were getting raided and wiped out on a regular basis. Eventually it became clear that some non-bird, non-squirrel critter had developed a major-league non-cheap suet addiction, and since I was able to keep a close eye on the feeders during the day, it was equally clear that whatever was committing this foul deed was doing it at night.

Now I’ll be the first to acknowledge that I occasionally engage in some pretty odd activities, but even I’m not going to spend hour upon hour in the dead of winter on some kind of late-night stakeout in my own yard. That meant that pretty much the only option available was a trap, so I picked up one of those so-called “humane” box traps (had to be a non-lethal trap in case one of the cats got into it) and started setting it up under one of our trees that had a woodpecker feeder that had been particularly prone to raiding.

The very first night I got my very first catch in the trap, but it was just one of the neighbor’s cats – so I let Bootsy go and re-set it. Only two nights later, I caught the ugliest, nastiest, greasiest, weirdest looking critter you’ve ever seen. A possum. The problem with possums is that if you have one in the area you’ve normally got a dozen, so I went ahead and put him down and re-set the trap to hopefully get the rest of the clan.

Let me pause my little narrative here for a moment and acknowledge the fact that there are going to be soft-hearted people reading this who are going to send me all sorts of e-mails spewing all sorts of righteous indignation, because every once in awhile I kill things, and I don’t even have the decency to get my panties in a wad about it. What can I tell you? It is what it is. I hunt and I fish, both of which often involve something ending up dead, and hopefully something ending up eaten. I don’t normally like to kill things I’m not planning to eat, but all bets are off when it comes to critters in my yard. I’ve often been asked “Can’t you just trap it and release it somewhere else?” – but that’s always a dumb idea. Once a wild animal loses its fear of people and figures out that a human house is a good source for an easy meal? Then all you’re doing is giving someone else your problems. Better to solve them yourself.

But anyway, back to my story…
So I’d gotten into the habit of going out to check the trap each evening before I went to bed. One night around midnight I put on my slippers and bathrobe, grabbed a gun and a flashlight, stuck of box of .22 shells in my pocket, and headed to the backyard for my (unexpected) date with destiny.

I should mention something about the particular gun I decided to take with me. It’s one of my favorites, a little single-shot survival rifle made by Springfield Armory called the M6 Scout. Back in the 60′s and 70′s they issued them to Air Force pilots to pack in their Escape & Evasion kits. I’m not terribly worried about getting shot down in Soviet airspace or anything, but I like the M6 because it’s light, small, carries its own ammunition in the stock, and breaks down into two pieces so you can easily stow it in a backpack when you’re out on a long hike. The downside being that it’s a single-shot, so you have to kind of break the whole gun open and put one little round at a time in one little hole, then close it all back up in order to shoot it. Since it takes a long time to reload, and fires a very small .22 bullet, this isn’t normally the kind of blunderbuss a person would bring along to a life-and-death encounter with a ravenous hellbeast, but it’s perfect for putting a round through the brainpan of a harmless animal caught in a trap, and that’s why I grabbed it.

Thus provisioned, armed and equipped, I found myself a few moments later, standing under a maple tree in my backyard, looking at an empty trap. No dice tonight. It was cold as hell, and I was standing there in my bathrobe and slippers, so I’d just turned around to head back to the house when I heard a faint scratching sound from somewhere above me. I turned the flashlight upward, and there in the beam, was a raccoon. Not just a raccoon mind you, but a raccoon 10 feet over my head, looking down at me, with one arm wrapped around the trunk of the tree and the other arm buried elbow-deep in my woodpecker feeder. Frozen in the light, and caught in the act.

Next Page >>