An Opportunity Lost

What can I say? Once again, my lack of foresight has cost me an opportunity that can’t be regained.

Like not buying Apple or Wal Mart in 1959.

OK, I wasn’t born then, so those weren’t really my fault. If I had, though, we’d be on that round-the-world retirement cruise already.

In this case, it’s much less significant, but still, I regret the decision.

I could have had a pair of actual, honest to goodness fur lined bedroom slippers.

I don’t mean those with the faux sheepskin inside, that acrylic stuff that’s good for a couple of weeks before it all gets matted down and disgusting, but rather a pair of nice fuzzy slippers with something that used to be on the outside of a critter on the inside comforting my tootsies.

If only I’d realized the bounty that awaited and taken some decisive action.

I came to this realization yesterday afternoon, as I toted the sixth squirrel off in my little Hav-a-Hart box trap as a part of my neighborhood’s annoying animal relocation program.

We always have a high population of these little rats with a good marketing campaign running around. Most of the time, I don’t worry about them a lot and limit my ranting to (a) when they get in the attic and make noises knocking things over and (b) when I catch them raiding the bird feeders.

The birds are already on a budget – they get 25 pounds of food a month, which is enough to promote codependency among the winged wildlife population in our area as long as the fur-bearing creatures stay out of the feeders.

A couple of weeks ago, I realized that the “squirrel proof” feeder is not and decided it was time to take drastic measures.

Well, semi-drastic. I have resisted the urge to open the kitchen window and draw a bead on them, in part because I know in my heart it’s just going to annoy the local police and in part because it’s been so long since I fired any kind of gun off that I’m not sure I could still hit the little buggers.

So my trap comes out, baited with that fool-proof lure for most of us – peanut butter.

The neighbors and I have an informal agreement regarding the trapline. We move it around in the place we think most likely to have success without regard to property lines or actual ownership of the squirrels involved. Generally, we net 3 or 4 animals a season. The most dramatic one, which the neighbor caught on video, is when a squirrel is in the trap in his back yard – as a fox is trying to figure out how to open the trap up for a snack.

It’s the only time that I’ve seen one of Bullwinkle’s little friends actually eager to stay in the trap. Usually they’re bouncing around and chewing on the wire trying to escape.

This year, though, either the population is so thick or the young are so dumb that they’ve practically stood there waiting for me to return the trap so they can jump in.

Six of them in the last 48 hours, in fact.

I find that I don’t have the stomach to kill them, even though they are little more than rats that have figured out how to work the system better than their homlier cousins.

I can do a quick clean kill if necessary – snap traps (which I don’t set because I like the chipmunks. Go figure), poison (which is a hassle to set so that neither the birds nor the chipmunks can get to it) or a borrowed pellet gun are all possibilities.

Instead, though, I’d rather invite them in for a meal and then when they find they’ve overindulged and can’t leave simply take them for a ride to one of the parks or the lake, hoping the heartburn will kill them, given that most forest creatures have no access to Prilosec.

Knowing what some in my family might be thinking, I will say up front that I do not take them to the boat ramp at the lake to see if they can swim. Instead I turn them loose to become someone else’s problem, figuring that if they can navigate a five-lane highway to come back to my house, they’ve probably earned the opportunity to stay here until they’re dumb enough to drop by for another peanut butter sandwich.

Most seem so eager to get away from me that they don’t worry too much about their new surroundings and have travelled enough that I don’t think I’ve caught the same one six times. I can tell because the bird feeders aren’t empty every 24 hours since I started.

But because of my lack of planning I’ve missed out on a pair of fur-lined slippers. Granted, they would have been “on the hoof” and probably would have taken more effort than I am willing to put out, but there it was for the taking.

If I really wanted to “go green” it could even have been about as local as food can get, since you can’t just harvest the fur and let the little goomers run around naked.

We’re not that hungry, though, and still prefer that our protein come on little trays with shrink wrap from the grocery store.

I guess I’ll confine my “hunter-gathering” urges to a nice catalog. Maybe they’ll have fur-lined slippers on sale since it’s the off season.

In the meantime, though, I see that #7 has dropped by for a snack and now needs to be walked, perhaps over by the soccer fields a few miles away.