By Buster McNutt
We’re in the middle of our three weeks of winter here in Florida. Not that we have snow, or really even ice. I think that’s a touristy zoning thing around here. It’s not so much ice as it is mice, and not your ordinary mice at that.
Now, you probably already know that in South Florida, in the Everglades, we have a problem with really large “non-native” pythons and both boa and girla constrictors. As a general rule they will eat anything that an alligator will eat, and then they’ll also eat the alligator for good measure. And they breed like crazy, although I’m pretty sure I missed the “Wild Kingdom” episode where Marlin Perkins explained the mating rituals of snakes (“If you watch very closely, Jim, you can see the female snake’s nostrils flare, and the male snake using his fangs to lubricate his eyelids, signaling to the female that a fresh batch of egg fertilizer is in the pipeline, and it’s high time to slither down, uh huh, uh huh!”).
So naturally the state wants to get rid of them before they eat all the other wildlife and start hitching rides to Miami to eat drug dealers, interior decorators, and residents at any of the area’s jai alai player retirement homes. When nothing else worked, the University of Tim Tebow bred a race of hairless mice that had their genes altered so that whatever ate them became, ah, to use the scientific term, impotent (which is nowhere near the same as “important”— spell check be darned). The plan was to ship them to the Everglades and have the snakes eat them. They even coated their skin with the female snake nostril stuff to attract the male snakes (file under “Desperate Times Call for Desperate Measures”). Long story short (you’re welcome), the truck carrying the mice wrecked, the mice got loose, and decided, for whatever reason, my neighborhood was the happening mice place. So in a very short time we had gazillions of “non-native” hairless mice dividing their time between breeding and being eaten by cats, rendering the cats noodle-ized and thereby decreasing the population of the mice’s main predator.
When winter came the hairless mice had a problem, because there weren’t any Burlington Coat Factory stores in the area that carried mice-size coats. Rather than freeze they started heading anyplace warm, which in our area was pretty much limited to double-wides and, unfortunately, vehicle engine compartments, where they made nests, flared their nostrils, got busy, and so on.
This is where my neighbor Ron enters the picture. Ron has about an hour commute to work, so every morning he puts a frozen Jimmy Dean Sausage Bowl under the hood of his Silverado next to the exhaust manifold. By the time he gets to work the sausage is cooked and he has his breakfast ready. When he gets off work, he puts a frozen pizza under the hood for his dinner. Ron is not the neatest of guys; he regularly gets the anonymous “Nappy Neighbor” sign stuck in his yard. And that carries over to his truck’s engine compartment as well. So the mice would crawl up in the still-warm engine bay and snack on the pizza and sausage residue, and in some cases the parts they were attached to — particularly any wiring that, to them, was probably used in the spirit of dental hygiene as floss. Before long, Ron got tired of having to evict the mice and replace the chewed-through wiring.
He tied a couple cats under his truck at night, but they’d gotten the message from their all-show-no-go cat pals that eating hairless mice was not the same as oysters or those little blue cat pills — their meow would forever be an octave higher, which is great if they wanted to be in the Vienna Cats Choir, but otherwise it would be like they had two appendixes, if you get my meaning.
Ron had recently rid his double-wide of the mice using a couple dozen of those baited sticky mouse pads, so he naturally figured this should work for the truck as well. But who wants to start each day opening the hood and removing the mice and the pads they are stuck on, which naturally are also stuck to other stuff as well? So he decided to get the mice before they get into the engine compartment by, and this is the cool part, putting a dab of Super Glue to the back of the sticky pads, and attaching them to all four tires! When the mice come by on the way to the engine compartment buffet, they smell the bait and get stuck on the sticky pads! And it gets better! How, you ask, will Ron get the mouse populated sticky pads off the tires? Two words – dirt roads! We have one particularly bad stretch of dirt road between our houses and the “hard road” that leads to civilization. Ron just drives over that section at a higher than normal speed, and the sticky pads just come flying right off — no muss, no fuss, no bother. Well, I suppose there was some muss, but we have a very active vulture population, and they see the little hairless mice as pleasant bite-size hors d’oeuvres (French for Mouse Pate on Sticky Cracker) until someone has the courtesy to have a dog, squirrel, or deer collision so they can say vulture grace and have a proper meal. But after eating the mice they end up flying home and asking their spouses if this particular length of tail feathers makes their butts look big.
Me? I got a slightly smaller one of those big Everglades snakes and put one of those invisible dog fence radar collars on it to keep it around my vehicles. That pretty much solved the mouse, squirrel, armadillo and gopher turtle problems, as well as the alligator that had been stealing my morning paper and at least one of the delivery guy’s toes. But neighbor Ron was never all that happy about the snake, and one day it went missing. The next day Ron had his grill fired up, and was cooking what looked like two four feet long sausages. The next few weeks he was looking increasingly unhappy and his wife was appearing somewhat frustrated, for lack of a better word. Then, a couple days ago she signed up for a Jazzercise class with a personal trainer named “Biff.” So I don’t know what got into Ron. Could it be it was something he ate that possibly ate something else?
Sing it with me: “M-I-C-K-E-Y, M-O-U-S-E!” •
