Strangest Weekend Hobby Ever
Yesterday afternoon, Steve and I crawled around under someone's house looking for a dead animal.
How, you might ask, does one get to this place in life. WildCare, our chosen place for animal volunteering, is always on the look-out for new funding sources. Most recently the hospital is starting an exclusion business. What is exclusion? Basically, it is the process by which one humanely rids a residence of "pest" animals, mainly through strong encouragement to leave, and then closes entry points and makes the habit less hospitable. One might put predator scent (i.e. coyote poo) in a basement nest area and install a one-way door over the entry point. The animal leaves and can't get back in. They are "excluded". Since WildCare does not have its own exclusion Web site up and running yet, I will direct you to the Web sites of 2 colleague organizations which helped provide training for more information: Sonoma County Wildlife Rescue and San Francisco Rescued Orphan Mammal Program.
Saturday afternoon we actually made a check on such a job. A few days earlier, our friend Melanie had gone into someone's subfloor to locate a raccoon nest and scatter coyote poop about the area. Apparently in the mad tossing of poo the annoyed mother raccoon was accidentally hit in the forehead. Steve likes to imagine the raccoon thinking, "oh great, there goes the neighborhood. Surrounded by a bunch of monkeys throwing poo." At any rate, after the poo toss, Melanie left and waited for mom to move her babies to a safer neighborhood. Steve and I went back with her on Saturday to see if mom had taken the hint. Unfortunately, her babies were still too young for her to move and we'll have to go back in a few days to toss more poo and encourage them to develop an exit strategy. Their lack of movement did give us a chance to see our first baby raccoons of the season, at least 3 adorable little newborns, eyes still closed and without their black masks.
Another aspect of this work that kind be quite lucrative is to remove dead animals and arrange the property to exclude other, more active bodies. That was Sunday afternoon. Some woman in Tiburon said she had an awful stench coming from her crawl space and she had totally sealed off the access closet. We headed on over with Melanie after our morning shift in the WildCare clinic, Vick's Vapo-Rub at the ready. The woman took the tape off the door and swung it open. Nothing. We opened the crawl space and headed in. Nothing by the smell of dirt. We crawled along inspecting the entire underside of the house and never did find the smell. (Yes, Mom and Dad, I was wearing a mask, goggles, gloves, and a Tyvek suit.) We did find one desiccated rat, but it was too old to be the source of any smell. We even joked that, in the future, we should never go on a dead animal call without at least mummified rat in our pocket just in case we couldn't find anything.
At any rate, the woman seemed "happy" enough with Toby, the dead rat, especially since the smell was no longer present. While Melanie explained that Toby might not be the source of the smell and that we wouldn't be able to find it if it was in the walls, Steve performed some minor repairs to vents and drainage pipe outlets to keep other animals from getting in.
A $400 check later, we were on our way. The nice lady even said that we looked like the poster-children for this business. I prefer to think it was because she is mildly racist/classist and was pleased she didn't have the usual day laborers tromping through her pretty house and not because we looked like we were hoping to find a dead opossum to cook up for dinner.