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Wednesday, August 23, 2017 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
Tales from a
Sisters
Naturalist
by Jim Anderson
And you think
you’ve got trouble!
We all know that in
Sisters Country it’s tough
to grow veggies outdoors.
Corn is almost impossible,
fruit trees often bloom beau-
tifully in spring, only to be
frozen out the next day (like
my crab apples!)
To circumvent this com-
mon problem, my son Caleb
built me and Sue a very
beautiful greenhouse out of
sandbags, lumber and green-
house Solexx facing the sun.
For several years we’ve
enjoyed tomatoes, squash,
peppers and cucumbers with
only the pestiferous aphids
to battle. By using clever
placement of blankets and
space heater we can keep
the greenhouse going into
December and January most
winters.
Oh, those little mouth-
watering sungold tomatoes,
the huge deee-licious beef-
steaks and about six other
good to perfect tomatoes
Sue raised. How I wished
we could keep them going
through winter, but when
the temperature went to zero
we’d throw in the towel and
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call it quits.
It was a very sad day
when we cut off the heat
and water and let our tomato
plants turn to ice… I saved
as many of the young sun-
gold tomatoes as possible to
ripen, and when they were
gone I’d really get the win-
ter blues.
That’s the way it went,
year after year — until this
year. Then something moved
into our greenhouse that just
loved to commit mayhem!
It didn’t eat hardly anything
— it just went on night after
night destroying tomatoes,
cucumbers, peppers and our
milkweed starts.
Every morning we’d go
out and find another tomato
plant chewed off at the
surface, lovely, green and
healthy pepper plant leaves
lying about, and felled
milkweed.
Whatever it was it didn’t
touch all the quaking aspen
invading the greenhouse, oh,
no it just killed my sungold
tomatoes, left and right. I’m
usually at peace with Mother
Nature (all except her big,
slobbering mule deer that
hop over Sue’s seven-foot
fence to eat her beautiful
strawberry plants) and now
this “creature” who has
moved into our greenhouse,
bent on destroying every-
thing Sue is trying to grow.
It wasn’t mice. I tried
my small Victor snap traps
on them and came up with
nothing. (Using peanut but-
ter as bait, they never fail.)
It wasn’t gophers, we looked
for their sign in all the raised
beds and not a piece of soil
was moved there.
I suspected the California
ground squirrel who has
taken up residence under
one of my shops, but they’re
diurnal, and the critter who
was doing in our tomato
plats was nocturnal. By the
size and shape of the drop-
ping left behind I suspected
a packrat, so I went to work
again with two of those big
Victor rat traps.
Now, Good People, I DO
NOT like to kill anything.
But I do snap-trap mice.
The Hopi People have a say-
ing that I firmly agree with:
“Never allow mice to live in
your house, they will steal
the breath of your children.”
That’s one of the symptoms
of the hantavirus, and no one
wants that in their house!
Besides, the dead mice
are going to a good cause.
Marley, a great horned edu-
cational raptor that rehabber
Gary Landers watches over,
loves fresh-caught house
mice.
The various chipmunks
around my place are all
harmless and have never
moved into the greenhouse,
so they’re left alone. The big
California ground squirrel
and bushy-tailed packrats
have to move on because
they — like our Belding
ground squirrels and golden
mantels — are known carri-
ers of the bubonic plague.
I feared we had a packrat
coming into the greenhouse,
but not knowing much about
their preferences for food, I
wasn’t too sure. However,
Sue has a lot of money and
TLC wrapped up in our
greenhouse plants, and the
infernal killing was going on
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I put out the big Victor rat
traps and started with pea-
nut butter bait. That didn’t
work, so I went to baiting
with organic wheat chips,
then went to good old Lay’s
potato chips and finally to
cheeses of all kinds. Nothing
I set out was the right bait —
until I used boiled left-over
brussels sprouts garnished
with butter. That was it!
The beast swiped it from
one of my live traps. “Ah,
ha,” says I and moved the
smaller live trap into the
cupboard and placed a deli-
cious butter-soaked (just
the way I like ’em) brussels
sprout on top of the treadle.
“Jim!” Sue announced
PHOTO BY JIM ANDERSON
Double trouble on four legs, the bushy-tailed packrat.
“Peter made my day:
No exaggeration! The carpets looked new
when he left. He was thoughtful, focused
and did an excellent job.”
— Kelly Sheets
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the next morning. “We got
him!” When she brought in
the live trap, there was that
beautiful whisker-twitching,
bushy-tailed packrat with
tomato juice on his breath.
Yes, it’s still alive as
far as I know. I took it far
from any structures to one
of BLM’s wildlife corridors
and turned it loose. If it can
find its way back it’ll take
a long time, and I’ll know
who it is with that dab of red
marker ink I put on his tail.
So, if you suddenly have
a packrat turn up with a
dab of red on its tail, boil
up a few brussels sprouts,
lay some butter on ‘em and
call me, I’ll loan you my
live-trap.
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