When Wild Animals Sneak In

Do you have any pets?  My husband Joe and I live on Wood River Drive.  We fondly refer to our home, which is immediately adjacent to the woods and the river, as the Wood River Inn.  It’s our little piece of heaven right here in Niles.  Every day just outside our windows we are delighted to see deer, rabbits, squirrels, birds, opossums, and even the occasional turtle.  It’s kinda like having pets except we don’t have to feed them.  And when we go away for a few days or a few weeks we know they can fend for themselves.

One morning recently, my husband Joe heard a strange thumpin’ and bumpin’ in the garage.  When he went out there to investigate, he discovered things had been knocked off the shelves and some animal had left a few “calling cards.”  We’re usually careful about not leaving the garage door open after dusk because that’s when the nocturnal animals are out and about.  And living by the woods and the river, there are lots of them.  Well, I’d been out to dinner with a girlfriend the night before and when we got back to the Wood River Inn I made the mistake of opening the garage door and then talking with her in the car on the driveway for awhile.  That must have been when the critter snuck in!

Unfortunately, there was no way to tell for sure if the animal had left or not.  Joe sprang into action.  He went out and got a trap and set some bait in it.  Joe’s guess was that our visitor was a raccoon, and since they like fish he used salmon.  He figured that the next morning he’d have his culprit.  He sprinkled some flour around the trap so that if the animal inspected the trap but was too smart to fall for it, it would leave footprints.

The next morning we went out into the garage and were horrified to see footprints in the flour – but no animal in the trap!

My husband, being the engineer that he is, came up with another plan of action.  He built a clever contraption using a couple of 2 x 10’s, a section of wire mesh about 12” by 24”, and a few nails.  He positioned the boards along the bottom edge of the garage door.  Then he fabricated a little mesh gate which he placed in the middle between the two boards.  The gate was nailed to the boards and would only swing out.  The idea was that the animal could leave, but not re-enter.

The next morning we still weren’t sure if the animal had left – so we tore up the whole garage.  We’d been saying that “some day” we were gonna clean out the garage.  Well, that Saturday became “some day”!  But we didn’t find any animal.

We were just finishing up when our neighbor came by.  He told us that when he came home the night before, he saw a big opossum exiting our garage via the little gate Joe had made!  It was a relief to hear that someone had actually seen the opossum checking out of the Wood River Inn!

We love our “pets”, but we prefer that they stay outside in the woods and by the river.  If you ever find you have a critter in your garage, please feel free to give my Joe a call!  You can use his animal evacuation contraption.

Barbara Gembala Nakanishi