You who think of gardens as tranquil refugia from death’s entropic gaze, you who think of delving the soil as a peaceful pursuit, you likely have clean fingernails. There may be more individual suffering represented in a loaf of whole wheat bread than in a leather jacket, as anyone will tell you who has plowed under winter stubble.
The compost was alive this morning when I lifted the lid from the bin. The top foot of it, mainly rabbit manure and hay with a few egg shells mixed in, was powdery gray and crawling with ants. Beneath them, hiding from the dim winter sun a quarter inch below the surface, were sowbugs. The compost was loose, friable. Really, it was ready to put in the garden beds, and I turned it into the new bin instead mainly out of duty: I had not turned this pile all year. The stuff was fine and dry. It fell through my pitchfork tines. Once I’d taken a few forksful the old bin was in turmoil, disturbed out of its December drowse. Ants hurried to carry eggs to safety. Sowbugs tumbled over and under flakes of hay like polar bears on floes too small to support them. I kept shoveling.
The bin is beneath a coast live oak, prime salamander habitat, and so I do not stab randomly at the pile with the fork. I have blunted the tines, and I slide them gently beneath the compost and lift. I speculate that this will give slippery amphibians a better chance of escaping my delving without injury, and it is easier on my back besides. A third of the way through the pile today I saw a small hole open up, about half an inch across, and something moving hurriedly away from the light. I put the fork down, expecting an arboreal salamander or an Ensatina to emerge, perhaps a slender salamander, and then the thing poked its head out of the hole again, regarded me anxiously with its black bead eyes, long whiskers quivering against dark brown fur.
It leapt out of the hole and scampered toward the back corner of the pile, where the bin backs up against the fence, and squeezed down between them.
We had lots of mice in our compost pile in Richmond, to the point where Zeke would wag his tail furiously and jump with excitement when he saw me grab the pitchfork. It was doggie Whack-A-Mole time, and he’d shove his face between the tines and the pile, grabbing as many mice as he could. I didn’t really mind the interference. It slowed me down. On one day without Zeke, a fork thrust into the compost emerged with a little mouse impaled, speared through the abdomen and shoved about four inches along a center tine, wriggling. I pulled it off with a gloved hand, as gently as I could, intending to put it out of its misery. It bit at my glove — can’t say I blame it — and ran away to die in some dark corner of the garden. I spent half an hour that afternoon dulling the tines with a four-way file.
If there is a single species that sparks most often my internal conflict between compassion and reality, it… well, it would be human beings, of course. But after that, definitely mice. There are people who harbor fears of vermin, who shudder viscerally at the naked tail and dirty-colored fur and stealthiness and turds in the silverware drawer. I am not one of those people. True, my image of mice has been tainted by close association with Norway rats, who — though confused with mice in many minds — are orders of magnitude friendlier, more loyal and affectionate and intelligent than mice. That said, I have to admit that mice are, to a first approximation, the definition of cute. And my usual interaction with them consists of killing them. I’ve lost track of my body count. It’s in the three figures, about half of that lifetime accumulation of bad karma having been earned in four years in that house in Richmond.
Some people can’t bring themselves to kill them. You can buy little live traps in which you catch the mice, take them to “the wild” and release them, the theme song from “Born Free” playing in your head. Despite the sentimentality, this is not a good idea. They die prompt and usually agonizing deaths outside their natural habitat. House mice, members of species Mus musculus, have coevolved with Homo sapiens for the last several millennia. Their natural habitat is not the woods. It’s your house. Or your garden and compost pile.
Or your cultivated field, for that matter, where they thrive in the landscape most disturbed, if not devastated, by human activity. (Even a parking lot is not plowed twice a year.) They eat weed seeds and insects, a boon to farmers, and fruit and grain, for which they are often reviled. They burrow in the loose cultivated soil, and many are thus killed when the field is plowed, hence the remark above about suffering in your whole wheat bread. (Figure a pound of wheat per loaf, thus sixty loaves per bushel, thus about 3,000 loaves from a fertile acre, and while mouse population densities greater than 3,000 per acre are high enough that the farmer would likely be frantically emailing her Extension Agent to send over a tractor-trailer full of little plastic humane traps so that she could release them all in downtown Bakersfield, they are not, strictly speaking, unheard of. Even 3,000 per acre is a paltry number compared to some years. In 1926 and 1927, mouse densities on Central Vallley farms exceeded 80,000 per acre. No typo: eighty thousand per acre.
My compost pile this morning had a mouse population not even a quarter that dense: just 19,360 per acre. Which given that my compost bin has a three by three footprint works out to four mice. The second one, another gray adult, jumped out of the bin with my next careful forkful. It sat atop the pile cleaning its face blearily for a moment, and ran off toward the brush pile. “Good luck with the cats,” I thought. “Stay out of the house, or else Becky will make me kill you.” (Becky isn’t fearful of mice, only of hantavirus.) The third was smaller and black, an adolescent, and it clambered down the plastic side of the bin and hid beneath the pallet on which the bin sits. I didn’t set out to evict a family when I started this chore, I thought, and then the youngest sibling emerged.
It had charcoal fur, a body smaller than a table grape, and eyes that were somehow bright and black at the same time. It walked toward me, sniffed at me from the edge of the pile. I laid my gloved hand behind her, palm up. She stepped on calmly. (I decided without checking that she was female.) She was beautiful; clean-looking, well-proportioned, clearly still growing. I lifted my hand. She began, rather calmly for a wild mouse who has just been caught by someone who kills mice, to wash her face. I reached up slowly with my other hand, stroked her head and spine slowly, gently with a gloved fingertip. She did not flinch. After a moment I lowered her toward the leaf litter beneath the oak. She didn’t want to go, clambering up my wrist and almost down into the glove. But then she changed her mind, dropped down onto the leaves, walked into the brush pile.
I can always finish turning that pile tomorrow.
Up here, the compost pile is now warmly beneath a thick lid of snow—so in this season, when we make ourselves boot our way over there, we put the kitchen scraps on top and the local crow gang stirs it up and parties loudly for a while.
In the warmer seasons, I’ve never encountered mice down in there when I’m turning—only worms the thickness of my little finger and they do look juicy and tasty but my picky civilized self always cuts in while I’m thinking about it. That’s the closest I come to being caught between moral positions at the compost.
Thank you, as always, for a post that helps me see someone else’s garden while I’m not busy enough trying to cultivate my own.
Do we need to keep turning our compost pile in colder climates?
no Jerry being assaulted by mean old mr. teh Clarke?
The mice now know him as Clarke The Impaler.
In case no one’s mentioned it lately: You’re a very kind person.
I’m rather glad I don’t garden, neither ornamentally nor for foodstuff. It means I don’t have to wage war against the local fauna. I step carefully to avoid snails, rescue slugs from sunlight and heavily-trafficked paths, and put food out for squirrels and raccoons (and crows, though that part’s not voluntary).
I once had a bat fly into my house, up the stairs, and take up napping position on the molding in the spare bedroom. It was amazing: they don’t fly like birds at all, so I knew immediately what it was. I was thrilled, and would have loved to let it stay, but I have cats. I called around until I found someone who could tell me how to safely get the little guy down and release him outside. (I would have happily picked him up with my bare hand - but I’m only daft, not dumb; I know bats bite and might carry disease.)
If anyone needs to know, here’s how: Take a cardboard papertowel roll, loosely stuff one end with wadded newspaper, and use a rubber spatula to gently detach the little hind feet from the perch and slide the bat into the roll’s open end. Then take the roll outside, remove the newspaper, and let the bat slide out the bottom and fly away.
It worked just fine. He was asleep, of course; if you have a bat in your house, you probably have to wait until it perches and goes to sleep to do this.
A Christmas Mouse story?
that baby mouse sounds like the cutest thing in the universe! but we also have the no rodents loose in the house rule.
my son once rescued a couple of lab rat babies [mike and ike], and so we had a small pet rat colony in a large cage. they are smart and friendly creatures, very clean, lots of fun. unfortunately, one of their wild brothers made it into the house; he coveted the fancy rat chow, and never fell for the humane trap. we had quite a case of cognitive dissonence, until wild rat took off for new territory.
I get the feeling that if you wrote a phone book Chris, I’d read it. I’m sorry, but I do share my home with a few white-footed mice (Peromyscus leucopus). I’ve spent so much time at the base of the food chain myself that I haven’t the heart to evict anything this time of year. (I have a spider jar in the summer too) We get along well actually.
We live at the edge of a bit of woods and every fall mice find new ways into the house (I assume they’re new ways; the house has been mouseproofed by a guy who guarantees his work and he’s been back, free of charge, several years running). Now we have two cats. It’s no fun to wake up in the middle of the night to hear the cats batting around a live mouse.
I was hanging laundry yesterday and noticed a rather handsome bird eying me. It was black aside from an orange belly and a white spot on its rump. The long black tail was elegant. I finally realized that I was interrupting its feast on the larvae left behind while turning the compost an hour earlier. It turned out to be a white-rumped sharma , a species introduced from SE Asia.
There were a few weeks over the summer when there was a colony of mice living in the pile. They certainly seemed to resent my intrusions, even when I was merely increasing the food supply. It was fascinating watching a mother mouse trying frantically to save her offspring when I unearthed a nest. I waited while she relocated from the compost to a brushpile.
Odd that no-one has mentioned Burns’ poem, which was the first leap my mind made, almost precisely a match. It’s not long to his birthday, one of the grand Scots celebrations around this time of year.
To a Mouse
On turning her up in her nest with the plough, November 1785
...
Thou saw the fields laid bare an’ waste,
An’ weary winter comin’ fast,
An’ cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell —
Till, crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro’ thy cell
...
[leaving the description of a coulter as an exercise for the reader]
=v= I direct your attention to a scan I made of live-catch mousetrap instructions:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jym/336027625/
Executive Summary: Catch the mouse alive, then just toss it in your trashcan, and you’ll never have to think about it again!