Tuesday, July 15, 2014

Trapped!

Last week was a relaxing week and I had every intention of blogging....  Then had too much fun relaxing and enjoying my vacation.  :c)

We didn't go anyway in particular for vacation, just stayed around the house.  However, we did do a lot of visiting with family which was good.  Of the 10 days off on vacation, 5 of them were spent with family.  The other days we did some chores around the house and completed some projects that we had been meaning to finish up.

One of the items was to rid our front garden of our chipmunk problem.  We have 16 acres of land, with about 100 open acres around us and the chipmunks decide that they need to dig in my flower garden!  Argh!  I eventually had enough when they started killing some of my plants due to digging out the roots of the plants.  So we purchased a live trap to catch the chipmunks.



They certainly are cute little guys, but I'm tired of them digging in my garden.  The first day we had the trap, we caught a chipmunk within 3 hours.  The next day, we caught 3 more chipmunks.  At this point, we're up to 6 chipmunks captured.

After we capture them, we throw a towel over the trap so they don't freak out as much, and then walk them across the road (about 1/4 mile) to a farmer's field.  We see it as fair play... the farmer's field dumps all his rain runoff into a culvert that dumps onto our property (and floods it every time we have heavy rain), so we return the favor by giving him chipmunks.  There originally wasn't a culvert dumping the farmer's water onto our property until about 10 years ago when the farmer was tired of his fields flooding.  So he called the state and they put in a culvert, but never actually managed the water on the opposite side of the road.  They just let it dump onto the properties.

Anyway, we'll continue to trap the chipmunks and we may eventually start to mark them with spray paint to see if we're taking them far enough away.  If not, then we'll take them the opposite way on our property and cross a small river and deposit them on the other side.  That should at least deter them a bit.
 Happy Crafting!
~Sarah at upstateNYCreations

1 comment:

  1. I think it would be interesting to see if they come back - start marking them :) how interesting - I have a problem with squirrels but we live in the country - they are going to be here no matter what!

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