Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, May 18, 1990 TAG: 9005220246
SECTION: SMITH MT. LAKE GUIDE PAGE: SML-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ED SHAMY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
And you've heard about the turkey hunter who proudly totes his prey to a game checking station only to find out he's mistakenly killed a turkey buzzard.
You may have heard of confused deer jumping through plate glass storefronts, or bears roughing up bee hives, or muskrats and beavers undermining dock pilings with their burrowing and gnawing.
But have you heard about the turkey rodeo? The bottle-nosed skunk? The toilet-hugging snake or the gluttonous bass? And do you recall the hostage-holding groundhog?
They're great stories, and whether or not they're true is unimportant.
Here are some tales from the animal kingdom to chew on this season. Pass them along and feel free to add your own flourishes. Makes for a better story.
Start with the turkey rodeo, as related by Lt. Karl Martin, a state game warden.
An elderly lady called wardens to report that a wild turkey had been shot out of season near her home. She was going to try to help the wounded bird.
Martin set out to investigate.
While he was en route, the woman, in her 80s, managed to get a rope around the turkey's leg. The bird didn't like that much, and it dragged her bucking and kicking through her garden patch.
She struggled to get the bird into her house, and the wild turkey headed for cover beneath a bed. The woman dragged the turkey back out and roped it. By the time Martin arrived, the bound and gagged and wounded turkey had been subdued.
"That thing weighed close to 20 pounds, half as much as he did. The whole place looked like there'd been a fight going on."
Sgt. R.B. Jenkins, a state game warden in Franklin County, dispatched a man to a farm to investigate a farmer's complaint that hunters were shooting and killing his domestic turkeys.
Ron Henry went to the farm to gather evidence and, as he approached the farmer, a wounded gobbler - supposedly a tame gobbler - charged.
"It grabbed Mr. Henry far up on the inside of the thigh, not far from his plumbing works," said Jenkins. "Everybody was screaming and the bird was digging its beak in. It was a scene."
Henry wasn't seriously hurt.
The same can't be said for a fish on the Bedford County side of the lake.
Dee Teass, who operates Campers Paradise at Hales Ford, was working near the water last season when he saw a fish lounging on a rock in the shallows.
On closer inspection, Teass found that the fish wasn't lounging - it was croaking.
A closer look showed the 6-inch-long large-mouthed bass had been felled by its own gluttony. The tail of another fish protruded from its mouth, and the bass was choking to death.
Teass admits he tried no bass Heimlich maneuver.
"It was too late for that. He was a goner," Teass said.
Lots of lake-area gardeners wish the same fate would befall woodchucks.
It's war in the potato patch as gardeners and woodchucks lock horns in an eternal battle over fresh produce.
Thomas Wuergler lives and gardens near Hales Ford in Franklin County. Out back of his house stands an old one-room schoolhouse. It's a weathered old place with a teetering stone chimney jutting from a tin roof. But it's home to an extended family of woodchucks who've taken up residence beneath the wood floor.
It's also perilously close to Wuergler's large garden.
Every now and then, he'll grab for his gun and slowly open a window or crack open a door. From the house, it's a clear shot to the garden and it's always open season on woodchucks.
The woodchucks - groundhogs, whistle pigs, call 'em whatever you like, they still eat vegetables - are shrewd, though. They'll scamper back to the sanctuary of the schoolhouse before Wuergler can fire off a round.
He can't smoke 'em out, lest he burn down the school.
He just plants enough for gardener and guest.
Not everyone displays such patience when trying to get the better of the wild kingdom.
Vincent Brads, the animal control officer for Bedford County, was called upon earlier this year to get a snake out of a house.
The snake had slithered from the kitchen into a washroom, but not before a woman in the house had perforated the floor with four shots from a revolver trying to do in the snake.
"It was just a big ol' blacksnake," said Brads, who trapped the four-footer and took it to a farm in the county. "Lots of people like black snakes around their barns. They eat rats and they'll eat poisonous snakes, too."
Sgt. R.B. Jenkins, a game warden stationed in Franklin County, was called to a home in Union Hall a few years ago by a woman rendered hysterical by a snake that had slithered inside.
"That's not a priority item for us," said Jenkins. "About 99.9 percent of the snakes are not poisonous, and they'll eventually leave, but this woman was near out of her mind."
So he went to see the problem for himself.
"Inside was this 7-foot-long black snake, I mean, the biggest one you had ever seen."
The snake had wrapped itself around the toilet bowl.
"She was screaming at me to shoot it, but with the .357 Magnums we were carrying, I would have blown the plumbing all over the place."
Jenkins pried the monster from the bowl with a riot baton and a lot of muscle.
Steve Lynch is the animal control officer in Franklin County.
"There is no such thing as a harmless snake to me," says Lynch, a man who once served as a sheriff's deputy and found a stolen python in the back of a pickup truck.
Lynch traveled to Burnt Chimney during the spring to help a woman who'd found an intruding snake. It was coiled inside a flower pot in her home, and she discovered the serpent while watering.
"It was a mix of a black and a copperhead - I don't know what it was. I didn't like it," said Lynch.
And the final snake story comes from Game Warden Steve Pike in Bedford County. He was stocking trout in a stream earlier this year when a couple of fishermen called for his help.
A fish was lying with its head on the stream bank, its tail in the water, apparently having jumped out of the water, and the fishermen asked Pike to help the trout.
"I climbed over some rocks and reached to grab the fish. It didn't move - I mean, it wouldn't budge and I was yanking hard as I could," said Pike.
Finally, he gave one mighty tug and the fish did come out of the water. So, too, did the water snake that had swallowed the trout's back end.
"It scared me half to death. I threw that fish and that snake in the air," said Pike.
The whole mess of wildlife flew across the stream toward another fisherman, who bolted for cover.
Last season, some tourists rented a houseboat from Campers Paradise in Hales Ford.
Dee Teass says the bunch took off down the lake and moored at an island. This, mind you, is the same island where someone released a herd of goats years ago to control the grass and the brush.
The boaters frolicked for a bit and returned to their vessel for the trip home - only to find that stowaway goats had crowded onto the boat.
The boat-renters dug into their picnic baskets for bait. They pushed goats, tugged goats, roped goats and lured goats off the boat.
"That was on Goat Island," says Teass. "I don't know what it's really called. We nicknamed it that."
A Bedford County bobcat was of no mind to meet a similar fate, says Vincent Brads. After a few lambs disappeared from a meadow, and wool tufts were traced back to a lair, a group of hunters tried to free the farmer from the predator of his flock.
They set a box trap for the big cat.
It worked, almost.
The next day the trap had been sprung and the bobcat had spent some time inside, said Brads.
But it had ripped a wall off the sturdy trap and escaped.
Give bobcats, which still thrive in the forests around the lake, wide berth, Brads advises.
Skunks, too. Lt. Karl Martin was called for some advice from a Smith Mountain Lake campground - a skunk foraging for food in a garbage had managed to get a jar over its snout.
The skunk couldn't eat, couldn't drink and couldn't move around very well.
"They called me and asked what they should do," said Martin. "I told them to take a BB gun or a pellet gun and shoot at it, but that didn't set well with them."
So he relayed an old wives' tale: "I've heard that if you keep a skunk's tail down, it won't spray you. But I told them to throw a heavy canvas over it before they tried."
"A little while later I got a another call. They wanted to know how to scrub off skunk scent."
Everybody learned a lesson.
"Apparently that method did not work," said Martin.
Steve Pike, the game warden, was called to a Bedford County home by a man held hostage by a deranged groundhog.
"This groundhog was in the bushes, and every time the man would try to leave his house, the groundhog would charge. The guy wanted to go grocery shopping, but he wouldn't even come out on his porch," Pike said. "He was holed up in his house for about 45 minutes."
Game wardens freed the man by conking the woodchuck, which had become so aggressive because it was ill.
Pike was called once to a home where a white-tailed deer fawn was being kept without a permit. He and a deputy pulled the fawn from a small shed, but the animal went nuts with rage.
It butted the deputy and kicked him in the face, breaking his sunglasses, finally toppling the outmanned deputy over a woodpile, said Pike.
"They were wrasslin' pretty good, really going at it," he said.
Together, they muscled the deer into the back seat of the warden's car, and even put cuffs on its legs.
But the fawn thrashed about in the car and caused quite a problem as the wardens drove along U.S. 460.
Finally, they rolled a window down so the young deer could stick its head out. Like a dog, the deer relaxed, sniffed the air, and rode quietly as a mouse to its new home - a remote area of forest.
Pike rarely seems to get an easy call.
A sick fox was having convulsions and acting strangely, and Pike and a deputy were dispatched to take the animal away.
They put the fox in a box and put in their car.
Of course, the fox managed to get its head out of the box. In the car. While Pike was driving.
The deputy drew his gun, and planned to shoot the wild fox while it thrashed and struggled in the back seat, immediately behind the men.
Pike pleaded with the deputy not to shoot.
Instead, they pulled off the road into a country store's parking lot.
"We came baling out of that car, and then the fox did, and it started chasing people all over," said Pike.
He had to chase the fox into the woods, away from the people, and destroy it.
He laughs about it now.
At the time, though, he was too scared to laugh.
by CNB