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Ted:

Looked out my kitchen window earlier today to see a half eaten Cherokee Purple sitting on my deck railing. When I came out to investigate there were also several unripened small green tomatos scattered on my deck. The perpetrator was beating a hasty retreat across a limb of the big Ponderosa pine that abutts our deck in the front yard.

We'd been finding more damaged tomatoes lately and finally... this squirrel has settled on our tomatoes as being an easy solution to her hunger. A big, healthy, fearless pine squirrel that has claimed our little garden as her own.

I ran her off twice but within a hour or two she was back. "That's It" I said to myself and went into "manland" (as my wife Ann refers to it) looking for my GAMO Whisperer. Found it and finally...some .177s, took it out behind the house to confirm the sights were accurate (they weren't, but they are now) broke it open and sat on the deck. My wife came out to chat and while we were discoursing that darn squirrel came sneaking back onto the deck (Ann heard her coming long before I did). Bad plan on her part.

I must be getting soft in my old age as dispatching her made me feel a little bad about it (I'd also just heard [from her brother] that the author of my new favorite tomato book had passed as well).

All deaths seem to bother me more now. Tim Curry and Dolly Parton seemingly have lots of company today.

I hope I never get so soft hearted that it bothers me to dispatch an armadillo.

Since I started trapping them in my backyard I have caught thirty.

I would like to know one thing good that they do for the environment or mankind.

In "Yellowstone" terms, when I catch one I give it a ride to the train station.

Armadillos. I have but one story.

When our idiot governor closed down the state of Minnesota, during COVID, it dawned on me that it was a perfect time for a road trip. My son and I went to Missouri to procure a 1989 FJ1200, because, of course we did. Throw sand in the gears of the machine whenever possible. There was no better time to consider the trip then when our cowardly moron of a governor was peeing himself and exceeding his authority.

We actually had a blast, although we learned Siri’s navigation limitations. Picked up a trailer in Columbia, tied the old girl down, and headed back to Minnesota. Along the way, we started seeing dead armadillos, many of the little buggers. It occurred to me that this was perhaps a teachable moment, and we should stop and pick up as many as we could, to toss them from the truck in Minnesota, and breathlessly report the coming climate change apocalypse to the media, after dark, when we got home. How many opportunities does a guy with a son have to point out how easy it is to cause turmoil for the idiots on the left who have run this state for decades, and provide a fun and foolproof example of exactly how to do same? The rain we were traveling in washed most of the blood off the little varmints, seemed like a bunch of easy smiles.

Alas, it was not to be. It was a long way home, in a driving rain at about 40 degrees in Missouri, and the temp steadily dropped all the way home, where it was perhaps 35 degrees and ice was forming on the edges of the road. The pony trailer might have been just a bit undersized for a mighty FJ1200, and the 600 pounds of bike was a handful behind the truck in those conditions.

Would have been cool.




Best,
Ted

That kind of prank would be right up my alley. Man, I wish you could have pulled it off.

BTW, nothing on God's green earth smells as bad as a rotting armadillo.

Thanks for the great story. LMAO.

OBTW, we call them a 'possum on a half shell.

Armadillos sound like they're in the same family as stink bugs, ticks, starlings, and lampreys. Some woman my boss knows says that they are infested with the bubonic plague or some other such thing, and is terrified of them, although I don't think one has ever been seen in Pennsylvania.

Groundhogs are the bane of my existence, I have absolutely no conscience when it comes to dealing with them. Little ones, big ones, babies, they all catch a bullet and get "chucked" across the creek.

I have had some issues with red squirrels. One was causing trouble in my shed, I went in one night and there he was, so I stuck a shot shell in my 22, and when he stopped on top of a box I let him have it. Of course, he stopped just below a window, and that's when I shot, what was I thinking? But fortunately I missed the window. Now, there's about a 6-in pattern of dust shot on the wall, in the center of the pattern is an outline of his head and neck, free of course from any shot holes. I have to chuckle every time I see it. Rat traps deal with them efficiently though, and with the possibility of less grief to personal belongings.


Tim

It's leprosy, Tim. Armadillos are the only known living thing that can host leprosy, other than humans.

My brother once released a bucket of blue crabs in the bathroom of a western Pennsylvania McDonalds.

Caused quite a stir for a bit

A waste of interesting resource but an extremely foriegn creature to folks that had never seen one before (or likely since).

That same McDonald's had also been (rather infamiously) the recipient of a road-killed woodchuck a few years earlier that was plopped on it's counter as potential payment for a Big Mac and fries...

The 1970s were interesting in that part of the world.

Stan,
A few other animals can carry Leprosy. From Wiki:

Naturally occurring infections have been reported in nonhuman primates (including the African chimpanzee, the sooty mangabey, and the cynomolgus macaque), armadillos,[36] and red squirrels.[37] Multilocus sequence typing of the armadillo M. leprae strains suggests that they were of human origin for at most a few hundred years.[38] Thus, it is suspected that armadillos first acquired the organism incidentally from early European explorers of the Americas.[39] This incidental transmission was sustained in the armadillo population. It may be transmitted back to humans, making leprosy a zoonotic disease (spread between humans and animals).[39]

Red squirrels (Sciurus vulgaris), a threatened species in Great Britain, were found to carry leprosy in November 2016.[40] It has been suggested that the trade in red squirrel fur, highly prized in the medieval period and intensively traded, may have been responsible for the leprosy epidemic in medieval Europe.[41] A pre-Norman era skull excavated in Hoxne, Suffolk, in 2017 was found to carry DNA from a strain of M. leprae which closely matched the strain carried by modern red squirrels on Brownsea Island.

They didn’t figure out Red Squirrels were a carrier until 2016.

I was never tempted to eat red squirrels (we had a member here who did) but, ate plenty of grays back in the day. The red squirrels in Europe are a different species than the little pests that are troubling Tim. Same MO, however.

I think the polite term for leprosy is Hanson’s disease.


Best,
Ted

It’s also one of the LEAST communicable diseases there is.

but, during the 70's when austin, texas was becoming a musical mecca, there was an old national guard armory made over into a music venue/dance hall/beer garden. at the armadillo world headquarters, they served armadillo tacos. and during that era, texas parks & wildlife issued an advisory that if you wanted to harvest and prepare them to eat, you should wear heavy-duty rubber gloves during the butchering, to minimize the possibility of blood borne leprosy being transmitted.

another interesting fact is that armadillos are still used for medical studies of leprosy, and they must routinely be captured because they simply will not reproduce in captivity.

do you know the real reason that the chicken crossed the road? to prove to the armadillo that it could be done....

i never tried the tacos...