Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 12, 1995 TAG: 9511130009
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: STEVE KARK
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
In my own small way, I like to think I've done my part to help the environment. I recycle my beer cans and dump coffee grounds in the mulch pile. Instead of paper towels, I use old T-shirts as grease rags whenever possible.
=re Moreover, I try to keep our piece of the hollow a fit enough place to live, both as a habitat for wild animals and as a home for my wife and me. To that end, I've hung a few feeders and stack each year's Christmas tree in the woods as a roost for winter birds.
A month ago I even installed a bat shelter high up on the side of our house. Bats, you see, help control bugs during the summer. I appreciate little critters like bats, which brings me to the issue at hand.
The bat shelter has to be situated in such a manner as to prevent our cats, Sparky and Sunny, from preying on what they surely must see as flying mice. From the looks of it, they're proud enough when they catch an ordinary mouse. One can only begin to imagine, then, how it inflates their little cat egos to snatch these things that look like souped-up mice on the wing.
To my knowledge, they've managed to do this only once. That hasn't stopped them, however, from picking on every other wild critter out this way.
I could hang bells on the cats. It works well enough when it comes to preventing them from indulging their appetites for birds and such, but it doesn't help one bit when it comes to catching mice.
Hang bells on your cats and you might as well invite the darn mice to pull up a chair at the dinner table. Traps aren't the answer either, unless we keep them out of paw's reach. Besides, mouse traps are too messy, too medieval for my tastes.
About the only thing left is trying to train the cats, which is about as easy as tryin' to poke one out from under a porch with a rope.
That doesn't stop me from trying, though. Mama didn't raise a quitter.
So, the other day when I found that Sparky had treed a chipmunk, I hoped to teach him a lesson. As it turned out, things happened the other way around.
Actually, the "tree" in this particular situation was no more than a sapling. The chipmunk had wedged itself between a fork in the branches, and there he stayed, sqeaking pitifully, no more than five feet above the cat.
Fortunately for the chipmunk, the sapling was armed all around by inch-long thorns. And that was the state of things when I showed up. The cat couldn't go up, nor could the chipmunk come down. A thorny dilemma indeed!
I scolded the cat, who was, after all, only doing what cats do naturally. He reluctantly retreated under the back deck.
Oddly enough, Sparky had recently been in similar straits himself, an irony entirely wasted on the cat but one that I couldn't pass up. A neighbor's dog had forced him up a tree not much bigger than this one. On that occasion I had to rescue the cat. Now the tables were turned: the hunted had become the hunter.
To make a long story short, I bent the sapling to the ground and the chipmunk escaped. But that, however, wasn't the end of it for me. Though generally not one to make a mountain out of a molehill, nonetheless I couldn't help seeing these events within a larger context.
Understand, I've had days like that myself. Haven't we all? One day you're on top, on the bottom the next. What goes around comes around, that sort of thing.
There's a song on the radio with a lyric that sums it up nicely: "Sometimes you're the windshield; sometimes you're the bug."
Ain't that the truth?
by CNB