Eliminating Vermin

Weather: The week was gray with unfulfilled promises of rain not delivered.

NOAA, better known as the weather bureau, changed its menu for accessing satellite photographs. It’s now easier to switch from one region to another, and see the Pacific Ocean and the west coast. Since this is the first winter I’ve looked at it, I don’t yet know what’s normal. What struck me may have been commonplace.

In summer, much of our moisture comes from the area southwest of the tip of Baja where ocean waters warmed by the summer sun contact cooler ones to produce hurricanes. The moisture is sent towards us.

This past week, there was a tremendous turmoil farther west in the Pacific. It was about the time a typhoon hit the Philippines on 24 December. The moisture spun around a center at the north end of Baja, but when it came inland it went north into Arizona and east into southwestern Texas. We just got the wisps that drifted between the two streams.

Last snow: 12/29. Week’s low: 16 degrees F. Week’s high: 51 degrees F in the shade.

What’s green: Leaves on juniper and other evergreens, cliff rose, yuccas, pink evening primroses, one snapdragon, one alfilerillo, blue flax growing in tiles, a few hollyhocks, coral bells; juniper dropping its berries

What’s red or purple: Leaves on coral beard tongues; new growth on roses, apricots, and peaches, branches of sweet cherries

Tasks: A few seed catalogs appeared in the mailbox the day after Christmas.

Animal sightings: Small prints of bird feet along the garage path and veering into the bed. I don’t know that they were eating. The most likely seeds were the purple coneflowers.

Weekly update: When the varmint first began destroying my plants in 2006, I thought it was a gopher because it left huge mounds of dirt. It wasn’t until I actually saw a squirrel in my garden that I realized I might have been wrong.

In the meantime, I tried to find ways to get rid of gophers.

One day I was putting rose bushes into the trunk of my car in the parking lot of the local hardware store, when someone came up to evangelize me. When her husband joined her, the conversation changed from God to plants. I think he was a Sikh.

I mentioned I had problems with gophers and didn’t know what to do.

He told me a local feed store had something that worked. He gave me the owner’s name, rather than the name of the store.

For the next couple years I asked people if they knew where that store was located, but no one knew, not even people with that name.

Finally, I went into one of the stores and asked if they had anything that killed gophers. Someone pointed me to the appropriate shelves and left.

I bought something that said it would work, but didn’t pay much attention to it until I got it home. The active ingredient was arsenic.

All I knew about it, other than it tinted glass green, was what I leaned in Agatha Christie mysteries. Murders were always being doing with bits of arsenic left in the garden shed.

I marveled. The last time I bought a small bottle of rubber cement, I had to show an ID. When I made some remark, the clerk started treating me like I was some kind of criminal. I’ve avoided her checkout lane since. Sniffing rubber cement is hard, and the taste is bitter.

When I bought the arsenic, all they asked for was my credit card.

They left me with a greater disposal problem than eradicating gophers. I left the jar unopened in an old refrigerator in the garage.

Two years ago I was cleaning out my garage. I included it in a box of paint I was taking to the landfill. They were hosting a hazardous material day. It apparently was sponsored by some federal or other outside group who sent it its own truck and crew.

It was a rainy Saturday morning in October when I took my place in a line of contractors’ pickup trucks. The crew emptied my car with no questions. I supposed it was going to someplace with even more poisonous substances. Lord know what kind of brew was created when everything in that truck was emptied into some pit.

I makes little sense to think the man I talked to was a Sikh if his wife was trying to convince me of Christ’s saving nature. The only reason that association stayed in my mind was he told me the stuff the local store sold came from Pakistan.

Notes on photographs:
1. Ground squirrel in my garden, 26 July 2008; taken through the window with the zooming function.

2. Mound in near my house,  1 October 2006.

3. Mound near a cholla cactus that it eventually destroyed, 23 December 2010.