Yesterday, I went out at 6 am to release the chickens, as I do every morning, when I realized that there was something wrong. A juvenile opossum had become caught in one of our rat traps. Her right front paw was held fast by the trap, and it seemed clear that she had been there for several hours.
I went inside and woke up Tom, and after donning heavy leather gloves, we managed to free her and house her temporarily in a cardboard box. I called our local wildlife rescue (Lindsay Wildlife Experience), and while they are usually open every day for this sort of emergency, they were actually closed. I left a message, not knowing what else to do. Within an hour, one of their volunteers had called me back to tell me where to take the opossum (a local animal hospital was taking Lindsay’s patients that day). Tom and I were able to drop the opossum off and I hope they can fix her mangled right paw and eventually release her into the wild again.
As you can imagine, we felt simply terrible about all of this. We thought we had found a sustainable way of reducing the populations of non-native rats in our garden and had designed the traps so that only rats could get in. We did not even think that an opossum would be interested in bird seed (they usually eat dead or rotten things), and certainly didn’t think about a baby opossum being able to access the trap. We thought we might eventually get a squirrel by accident (it seems they can get in any space no matter how well protected) but we weren’t too concerned about that, since non-native squirrels are quite prolific here and thinning them out might not be a bad thing. But we never considered anything else getting in.
The truth is that sometimes we make mistakes. We can have the best intentions in the world and still mess up.
I get a lot of questions from clients and readers of this blog who are agonizing over choices in the garden, such as how much to water, or what to plant, or whether to use fertilizer, or any of a hundred other things. I can give you advice, but honestly my advice isn’t worth very much. What is worth so much more is your own lived experience. This is all experimental. What works in my garden may not work in yours. Your soil may be different, or your exposure, or the way you plant a certain thing, or the seeds you use - there are a million different variables. The only thing we can do is try, and hope nothing gets hurt. And still, sometimes, as in our case with the opossum, something does get hurt. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t always try to do better, or to try at all. The trying is so important. And as we learn, we try different things, and then we learn some more.
I want to say the same thing about climate change and our reaction to it. Gosh yes it’s getting dire, and something on a large scale must be done, but there are a million personal choices we make every day that either affects the environment in a positive way or a negative one. Then there are a million more that might be only slightly positive, or the positive bits only slightly outweigh the negative. Does that mean we stop trying? Absolutely not. We must keep trying. Every day. To make the right choices and to tip the scale in the right direction.
We’ve removed all the rat traps. It’s just not worth harming an innocent creature. I will continue to do what I can to dissuade the rats from hanging out in our yard - things like removing the chicken food from the coop at night, and netting our vegetables. I will hope that the predators expand their numbers and realize that there is good food running around in our garden. I will hope that nature balances things out, without any ‘help’ from me, which is the way it really should be. And I’m going to keep experimenting, and keep learning.
