Every night three foxes come to our porch to enjoy a delicious plate of fruit my wife Susy puts out for their benefit.
Do foxes like fruit? You bet. Include a juicy mango and they’ll leave the stone as clean as a whistle. They also enjoy raw eggs and – believe it or not – peanuts, which they somehow manage to open very neatly.
I live in Pinar de la Venta, on the edge of the Bosque de la Primavera Forest and a mile high. A lot of the forest animals still haven’t figured out where the forest ends and the subdivision begins.
Those three foxes give me no grief, but I can’t say the same about a certain ringtailed cat that likes to prowl around in the space above our ceiling at three in the morning. The ringtail (Bassariscus astutus) is called cacomixle norteño in Spanish and is not a cat at all, but a member of the raccoon family. It’s supposed to be an excellent climber, but one night I heard a great commotion coming from that attic space. I jumped out of bed, ran to look and saw a big, freshly made hole in one of the ceiling panels. Suddenly a long, bushy cacomixtle tail dropped through it, dangling in the air like a pendulum.
Even more problematic are the squirrels and woodpeckers. The squirrels have discovered that the space under our car’s hood is often toasty warm even on a cold winter’s day. Well, I would be the last to deny them a cozy hideaway if they weren’t so fond of chewing the insulation off all the wiring in the engine compartment. In case you have the same problem, try coating your wires with a mixture of hot chili peppers, garlic and onions. It works and you’ll be the only person in the supermarket parking lot who can identify his car by smell!
The squirrels´ mortal enemies are the acorn woodpeckers (Melanerpes formicivorus) with whom they wage a dramatic fight over every peanut we place in the crotch of our guava tree.
While one woodpecker dive bombs the squirrel, another jumps onto the plate in the tree crotch, grabs a peanut and makes a beeline for a safe place far away where it pecks and pecks at the peanut shell until it opens. With five woodpeckers working as a team, it takes them no time at all to steal all the peanuts meant for the squirrel.
The woodpeckers may be well organized but smart they are not. One year they built their nest in an old oak tree with only one branch that extended uncomfortably close to our roof. So where did they decide to make their hole? Yes, precisely at the point where the lone branch connected to the tree. If there was one spot on that tree where a hole should not be made, that was it. And sure enough, once they had pecked out a big, roomy home for themselves, the inevitable happened ... naturally at 3 a.m. when we were sound asleep. Ka-boom! The old branch somehow missed our roof by a millimeter and exploded on the driveway like a bomb. We jumped out of bed figuring either World War III or Armageddon had just occurred. Of the carpinteros, there was not a sign. They had probably foreseen what was going to happen and had installed themselves in one of the many holes they had made in the telephone pole. Never a dull moment!
Other creatures that keep us on our toes are the scorpions. Believe me we quickly learned to keep those toes inside slippers whenever we wander around the house in the dark. At the end of our first year here I had filled half a jam jar with scorpions accidentally killed by being stepped on at night.
One evening I put on my pajama top and felt something wiggling inside it, crawling on my chest. Without thinking, I whacked whatever it was, ripped off my shirt and out of it plopped a yellow scorpion onto the bed sheet, flailing its legs and pinchers, utterly confused. “What hit me?” it seemed to say.
For years we had lots of scorpions and earwigs in our house. Open a book and an earwig fell out. Grab a bath towel and there was a big big black scorpion right in the middle of it. We also had occasional spiders, but gave them no quarter, whisking away their webs.
Then we met “Tarantula Man” Rodrigo Orozco. “Why do you kill spiders?” he asked. “They’re harmless. Before you kill any living creature, ask yourself whether you could ever make such a marvelous thing yourself.”
Well, that gave us pause and we decided to share our humble home with spiders as well as all the other creatures. After a while, we were even giving them names. Elmer, for example, is a big, amazingly flat crab spider. He lives on the kitchen wall and seems to recognize us when we pop in to get a drink of water at midnight. What was the result of giving spiders free rein of our house? You won’t believe it, but now we hardly ever see scorpions anymore, and as for the yearly plague of earwigs, it hasn’t happened in ages. In fact, I kind of miss those little guys. At last, Nature seems to have struck a balance in our home.
So, a big gracias to Tarantula Man ... and to Elmer, of course.