Rufus the Destroyer goes to Langley

Sometimes I worry that people are complaining that I’m putting up useless garbage that doesn’t meet the standards of a VOC trip report.

But sometimes I get mail telling me that I’m not being sufficiently ridiculous, so here we go.

It was in my mailbox.

Last spring, a squirrel started getting into our soffit. For a bit, you’d hear it running around up there, but then it moved to gnawing and scratching. It was stunningly loud. At first, you could knock on the ceiling where it was attacking and it’d take off for a while, but it grew steadily bolder and required progressively harder banging to dissuade it for shorter and shorter periods. It was persistent and was willing to devote hours to destroying our roof.

Long-time VOCer Line Veenstra used to work for Pest Detective, and my coworker back in the roller coaster maintenance days, Mike Leishman, used to work for Critter Control. Mike had more disturbing stories, but Pest Detective had a roach in a yellow trench coat, so I called Pest Detective.

The squirrel overheard the discussion and took off as soon as we’d made an appointment. When the Pest Detective showed up, we said there wasn’t anything we could do while the squirrel was on vacation. Because we had a tile roof, there are too many squirrel-sized gaps between the tiles and the eavestroughs, so making the roof squirrel-proof wouldn’t work. Our only option would be to trap the squirrel and relocate it. Squirrels are territorial, so your house will typically be in the territory of exactly one squirrel. If your squirrel is a jerk, you can put it somewhere else and hope that the new squirrel that expands its territory to your house has a better attitude.

It was over a hundred bucks to have them set a trap, and there was a trap rental fee, and if the trap caught the squirrel, they charged a relocation fee, and an extra charge if they had to relocate on a weekend. This all seemed pretty expensive. We waited for the squirrel to return, but it didn’t for months.

But recently:

It really was putting a full effort into destroying our house. For hours a day, we’d hear it ripping and clawing. I was really boggled at how much energy it was willing to spend destroying our house. I was smacking the wall harder and harder to get it to stop, and it was caring less and less. I was whacking hard enough that I could see the drywall deflect and concluded that I wasn’t going to win this way and would for sure put a hole in the drywall before I succeeded at backing off the squirrel.

I didn’t want to pay Pest Detective a wheelbarrow full of money, and I didn’t want to wait for a week for the next available appointment while the squirrel sawed the roof completely off our house, so I started googling options for trapping the thing myself.

When we got the trap, Devlin asked me if I was going to catch a mouffette. I didn’t know what a mouffette was, but I assumed he was looking at the French side, so I said yes. He was a little incredulous, so I took a look.

I definitely did not want a mouffette.

Screenshot from a PBS video on the chemistry of skunk spray

Regretful fox somewhere in Quebec(Photo: Rolland Gelly)

Back in the Playland days, we were briefly tormented by a mouffette. Mike Leishman, who had plenty of experience from his Critter Control experience, advised them to put a tarp over the trap, such that when the skunk was inside, they’d have a tarp between them and the skunk as they approached the trap. Since Mike was a more junior employee, no one listened to him, and soon they had a skunk in a trap with no tarp over it. They decided that since Mike had experience dealing with skunks, he was responsible for dealing with it.

To avoid a similar situation, I put the trap on the roof, near where the attacks were taking place. I got Scott to give me some mixed nuts, made a little foil bowl for the nuts, and headed onto the roof with Devlin belaying me. The squirrel was inside the roof, audibly destroying the place. I was somewhat concerned that I was going to end up with a crow in the trap.

Scott and Anne wanted immediate results and were agitating about what we could be doing differently. I pointed out that we couldn’t put the trap inside our roof, so we’d need to wait for the squirrel to take a food break before we’d have a chance at catching it.

The next morning, while I was still in bed, I heard a clanking ruckus, that sounded like it came from the roof. Was this it? I put on shoes and scampered outside and sure enough, the squirrel was in the trap. I woke up Devlin to belay me and brought it down. We decided it was named Rufus the Destroyer, based on its penchant for destruction and poor attitude.

The noises it made were incredible.

Devlin’s best photo

Another good one from Devlin

Iva covered the trap, so that it would settle down a bit, and I took it to Langley. Ever since the Tim-Hortons-poo-fling, Langley has seemed like the ideal place to discharge a belligerent.

The Township of Langley welcomes you, Rufus the Destroyer

In the end, I think he traumatized me more than I traumatized him.

When I got home, there was a crow on the roof with mixed nuts in its bill. I guess some were spilled during the commotion.