What the armadillo left me

Since armadillos not only like to dig holes in pretty lawns while they search for grubs, but also destroy flower beds in the hunt for bulbs and my flower beds were a mess before I caught up with my own personal armadillo last fall, I overcompensated when it came time to buy daffodils, tulips, and hyacinths.

This morning, with the sun shining and the temps in the 50s, I got to rue that decision.

Normally, I wouldn't have bought daffies or hyacinths since they come back year to year. But I didn't trust that to happen, so armed with 45 hyacinths, 100 tulips, and 40 daffodils, I started digging my own holes.

I've never held to the theory that they have to be planted WAY deep. Two or three inches has served me well and digging any deeper in our black clay soil requires more strength than I have or have had. I made my plan and put foot to shovel and found...

... bulbs. Several inches high in fact, nestled under piles of large sycamore leaves from our neighbors' down the street. I shall save my ire and think of them as a protective layer against the cold. I had to hunt around my previous hyacinths and indeed find a few new places, to plant the 45.

I ran into similar circumstances with the daffodils because I always go back to the same holes to dig. Go figure. However, there weren't any signs of budding tulips and really, not that many daffies.

My armadillo had a thing for tulips, would take a daffodil if hungry, and snubbed the hyacinths. Lucky me?

One photo, one thousand words

Report from the front yard

Today was the first day since, oh... April?, I've really wanted to work in the yard. It's been hot, it's been dry, we've been gone, I've been otherwise occupied... I got a million reasons (excuses?) why.

But today, and tomorrow, promise wonderful work-in-the-yard weather. I chose to start in the front flower beds.

First off, I notice the armadillo, absent for a few days, is back. Really, really back. Ten inch deep holes back. This is not encouraging and it looks like I shall have to go on the armadillo hunt again. The trap is still on the front porch and I'll lock and load tonight. This could be like getting out the flyswatter: the armadillo, just like the fly, will disappear.

That would have the same results, I guess.

I transplanted the sorry-looking Gerber daisies into the area around the sorry-looking gingko tree. I tried to remove the redbuds and weeds by their roots, not that that will discourage them.

I realized that if you want a lesson in resilience, you just need to look at pecan and hackberry trees. Rarely can I get them up by their nut or root. I cut them off as far down into the ground as I can, but they come back. And come back, etc. Ad infinitum. It's a battle I have been losing for 30 years.

OTOH, I had a very pleasant and unexpected surprise in the side yard. There were two green-cased pecans. This is how pecans often drop, attached by twos. Maybe it makes the fall less scary. Anyhow, they were GREEN. All I've seen are dried up pecans. So I rolled the case off and stepped on them. They were filled with nutmeat!

I may have pecans this year! Real, genuine, grow-my-own pecans! Amidst this drought--pecans!

Or perhaps I sacrificed the only two survivors.

Fighting a two-front war

To cut to the chase: Kay 0, Armadillo 1. Or, if you count nights of freedom and lawn-digging, since the rampage continues, the armadillo is 4.

My fruit offering has been rebuffed, so I'm upping the ante. I bought night crawlers at Walmart. Then the question arises, how to keep them from crawling away? Goodness knows, I'm not going to let them loose so they can crawl out of the trap! The internet to the rescue: nylon stockings! It just so happens that I keep a supply of mismatched knee-his.

As to the two-front war in the subject line: Tuesday morning who do I see dining on the back patio with the outdoor cats? A raccoon. Young and not very afraid of me, even though I did manage to make him skedaddle.

It's now a two-trap war.

Going on a grub worm hunt

Grub worms are the bane of any lawn. Around my lawn--and in my flowerbeds--they're ubiquitous. All I usually have to do to find one is dig a hole for a new plant.

Since this isn't the season for sprucing up my high-temperature-devasted flowerbeds, why would I be hunting for grub worms?

The answer is simple: we have an armadillo and it is time he went away. I'm going trapping and I need bait.

I first noticed a disturbance in my front flowerbeds about two-three weeks ago. There were holes and they weren't cat-potty holes. An armadillo was after my tulip and daffodil bulbs and if the number of holes are any indication, I will not have any bulbs left from last spring to enhance my next spring. I usually replant the tulips anyway, but I have (had?) so many daffodils. Hundreds. Really.

Obviously, I needed to do something about Mr. Armadillo, so I used my late neighbor's old wives' tale cure-all: blood meal. I sprinkled it liberally around the area and all seemed to be well until it wore off and there were holes again. More blood meal and this time it wasn't a week before there were more holes. Someone must have developed an immunity to it. Except now, instead of merely being in the flowerbeds, he'd branched out to the front lawn. It looked like a divot-pocked golf green. (Except the 60+ days of over 100 degrees have pretty well taken care of most green in our lawn, no matter the sprinkler system.)

I concluded that he'd eaten all my bulbs and was now after the grubs. Not that we mind him getting the grubs. It would have been nice for him to start there instead of the easy pickings of the flowerbeds. It would have been nicer had he covered up his holes. Good golfers repair their divots.

Despite my spouse's sympathy ("He's hungry and thirsty."), something has to be done. Perhaps he thinks all this grub-hunting is aeration?

So I went to dig grubs in the back yard where the armadillo, I think, cannot get in.

There weren't any that I could find. Instead I stumbled upon some bulbs and I hate to admit it, but that's what I've baited the trap with. My good bulbs.

He'd better be hungry and he'd better be there tonight!

The Armadillo Wars, Part 4a: A truce is declared?

I am not so naive as to believe the armadillo is gone for good, disgusted with my prime grubs and the nerve I display in trying to trap him. But he has not shown his little clawed feet in 3 nights and I am calling a truce. Not taking up the trap (who knows what raccoons may yet be curious), but not rebaiting it either.

I did an article for the North Texas e-News on being the recipient of a four-leaf clover and whether or not it changed my luck over three days.

Got rather philosophical, if I do say so myself.

Not philosphical enough to trap a armadillo...

The Armadillo Wars, Part 3: Not-so-impartial third party

Oh, oh,oh--this is so good! We can't believe what we're hearing! She's being out-armadillo'ed!

Oh--you don't know who we are? We're One and Two, Raccoons extraordinaire, at your service, if you please. We now live in the country, enjoying the good life, although there was a bump in the road, or two, before we got our rhythm down, if you know what we mean.

But we hear by the animal grapevine that Arnie Armadillo is outsmarting Ol' Ms. Trap-'em there in town. Really, we'd like to be honest with Arnie and tell him that there's plenty of grubs here, but it's just more fun thinking she can't get him.

We are laughing all the way from the hole in the tree to the lake's edge.

But we do need to clue him in about Erma. That 'dillo is playing fast and loose with his affections.

One and Two

The Armadillo Wars, Part 2c: Outflanked

So last night, I blocked the only other likely spot for the armadillo to get in. This morning, the wood was askew, the trap untouched, and the north side of the flower bed a hole-y mess. I have seriously underestimated the quality of the grubs in my yard. Seriously.

But never say die. (Say relocate instead.) The trap is going in the middle of the north flower beds. Maybe he'll just stumble into it.

One can always hope. After all, tis better to be lucky than good. I am obviously not the latter.

The Armadillo Wars, Part 2b: Outfoxed once again

I think he might actually have come into the back yard last night (despite the trap at the gate which means there's another way in), but he didn't stay long. There were a few new holes, but it could be my paranoia seeing them.

On the other hand, there's nothing paranoid about the multi-mutilations in the front flower beds.

I need two traps, one to steer him out of the back yard (because he's not taking the bait, folks) and one for him to stumble into in the front after he's high on grubs.

Back to the drawing board.

The Armadillo Wars, Part 2a: An open letter to the armadillo

Weren't the grubs good enough for you? Hmmm? You snubbed both back and front last night. Clever, clever.

But the trap stays up. It may be the only way I can protect the back flower beds and the cats are walking around it.

Clever, clever.

The Armadillo Wars, Part Ib

Undaunted by the previous night's no-show-armadillo, I dutifully left the trap up again last night. And was passed by one more time.

So, I have to ask myself: Was he just a traveling salesman type of armadillo, out to sniff and snort my grubs and then move on to (ahem!) greener pastures, or, did he approach my gate, use his extraordinary sense of nose-twitching, and--dare I say it?--smell a trap?

Tonight, no trap. If he comes back, I'll have to reevaluate my worthy opponent.

The Armadillo Wars, Part Ia

Yesterday afternoon I put my how-to-catch an armadillo research to use. I retrieved the live trap from the garage, saved fruit skins, and dug a dozen grubs. Positioning the trap by the most likely spot for the armadillo to come in (the space between the gate and the fence), I "funneled" him to it with two fairly stout branches we'd cut a week before. I put the fruit/grub cocktail in the trap and left it for him.

A no-show. No armadillo. No flower beds dug up either, so he just didn't come.

The nerve!

Undaunted, I await him tonight.

The Armadillo Wars: Part I

I would like to think this is the only Part, but I am not so naive. Twenty-eight years of living within sight of downtown has only assured me that creatures great and small don't care a thing about city limits. I've trapped possums, raccoons, and unruly cats. I am about to take on a new creature.

For those who don't know (or have never seen one upright and scurrying as opposed to dead and feet up on the highway), here is an article about the armadillo, the, to my horror, mascot of Texas I have learned. The people who named it so have obviously never had one in their back yard. Tearing up their flower beds.

Guess who does?

We have had passing acquaintance with armadillos before, and I've managed to beat them at their own game with the judicious use of blood meal. This trick I learned from back neighbor, Lucille, a farm woman transplanted to town by her children just before we moved here. It is her house we recently purchased and whose yard my husband is mowing. Again. But she had an armadillo under her house and used the blood meal trick at the entrance to its burrow (after making sure it wasn't in it) and that was that. Armadillo gone.

I did this last year for the invasion and one treatment was all it took. I have a different breed of armadillo on my hands this year.

I looked into my garden area yesterday morning and it was painfully obvious from the rooting and pillaging that had been going on on the south side, that an armadillo had visited. The good news was he had not disturbed any plants or bulbs (so far). The bad news was he was there at all. We think he's on a grub hunt, and I can certainly supply him with them. Part of me should be thanking him for ridding the area of them.

When I figure out which part, I'll let you know.

I hoed his holes into non-existence yesterday, sprinkled liberally with blood meal and dusted my hands. That was that!

Naive. Naive.

This morning, he'd been in all the familiar spots (blood meal? What blood meal?) plus doing rack and ruin to another area.

I have declared war.

If I could figure out how he is getting in, I could help myself in the strategy. He can't come under the fence because it is blocked by stones. He can climb I have learned, so blocking the gaps between the chain-link fence and the gate and house will just frustrate my back yard cat. I could blood meal his path down the driveway and may try that first.

But misery loves company and I've found a couple of online sites that deal with my problem. Texas A&M has a sense of humor with it (I do not) but thiscommercial site is more what I'm looking for.

It looks like Trapper Kay will have to come out of retirement. I can dig grubs as well as the armadillo and he'll have a fresh bowl of them waiting for him this evening.

Wish me well.