DAILY TRIBUNE (Columbia, Missouri) 20 July 08 Moles make homeowner miss serpent (Doug Pugh)
We’ve been having a lot of problems at our house lately with noxious beasts, varmints and creepy-crawlies of every description. And, no, I’m not talking about the new dog my wife and kids recently smuggled into my life without warning. At least the mongrel seems somewhat fearful of me and, other than shedding three bags full of hair on our sofa every night, hasn’t caused any sort of personal injury or property damage.
On the other hand, I’m afraid these moles might have gotten the best of me. We have used everything short of witchcraft and nuclear weapons in an attempt to rid our backyard of these little subterranean fiends, but so far to no avail. Where we could once gaze out our living room window at a pristine lawn of emerald beauty, we must now suffer the ravages of a labyrinth of mole superhighways, with clods of dirt shooting up before our very eyes. We are apparently living directly on top of the mole version of the Kingdom of Nimh.
The most effective method of eradicating these creatures, so far, has been the employment of an expert who calls himself the "Mole Man." This fellow sets up an elaborate series of medieval-looking metal traps throughout the yard and charges a hefty bounty for each little bugger he manages to spike up from the ground. Even this process, though, has not been without complications. Apparently some of his other customers are not as trusting as myself, so the Mole Man has adopted a unique and somewhat ritualistic method for proving he is actually doing his job.
On days when the Mole Man has had particular success, as you walk out the front door to fetch the newspaper, you find your entire front porch scattered with little plastic sandwich bags, each of them containing the corpse of a defeated rodent. I have never been able to figure out exactly what I’m expected to do with these tokens, so I have had to make arrangements to pay the Mole Man an additional surcharge to simply photograph his kill and then send the carnage via airmail to various addresses in Eastern Europe.
As annoying as the moles are, at least as far as I can tell, they are not lethal. The same can’t be said of the monster a couple of construction workers found lurking around our koi pond last month. For those of you fortunate enough not to have one, a koi pond is a small body of water that trendy and foolish people construct in their backyards, the intent being to fill them with pretty things like goldfish and lily pads.
But the inescapable result is they will transform within a matter of weeks into a stinking cesspool of algae, moss and dead frogs. Anyway, these two construction workers were at our house last month replacing some of our siding - which had been destroyed by a combination of termites, woodpeckers, Japanese beetles and who knows what other kind of beast - when they noticed a peculiar movement down by our koi pond. They came and rang the doorbell.
"Did ya know y’all got a gigantic copperhead livin’ down in your septic tank?" one of them asked when I came to the door.
I hesitated for a moment. "Oh you mean Fang, our pet pit viper?" I responded. "Sure. He just hangs out there during the day, and then we bring him in and he sleeps with us in the bed at night." The workers looked puzzled. "Of course I didn’t know there was a COPPERHEAD! What am I supposed to do?"
Luckily, one of the workers was apparently a trained herpetologist. "If I was you, I’d get me a chair, a six-pack of beer and a pellet gun and then sit out there ’til you can get a clean shot at him," he recommended.
"I’ll tell you what," I responded, "I’ll give you our living room sofa, every drop of liquor in the entire house and have someone bring in artillery. Then I’ll give you a phone number to call me up in Nova Scotia when you’re done."
A couple of days after the construction workers killed the snake, I was on the Internet researching exactly how close to death I had been. I came across a passage that informed me copperheads thrive on a diet "consisting of small mammals such as moles."
Does anyone know where I can get a good used copperhead?
Moles make homeowner miss serpent