I’m back at Paradise Gardens (check out what’s going on here). We are a rescue. We rescue all animals. And while we are at it we provide food for millions of mice. And then we turn the mice into food. Not for us. For the animals. The cats, the falcon, the tayra. Sometimes the monkeys get one, but that is without our help.
We also provide food for loads of squirrels. And doves. The squirrels are these shiny black, huge things with bushy tails and a taste for bananas. We leave bananas out daily for the local wild birds, the macaws, the monkeys (although I don’t think the squirrels venture into the monkey’s territory) and pretty much everything else. Even the big cat, Lottie, eats bananas. In fact every animal here treats bananas as if they are specialist delishistist yummyumist fruit there is. We use 90 bananas per day here. And the shiny black squirrels probably get about 5 of those. So not bad. But sometimes I just wishe I could catch one of those squirrels and let the tayra have a go at it. The tayra’s name is Tyrone, by the way. But for some reason people call him Chester. He’s an adolescent tayra, learning to hunt, and quite good at it, still playful (I’ve seen him chasing his tail) but ready to be released soon. Or so we think. There isn’t that much information out there on how and when rescued tayras can be released. But he’s full sized, healthy, and can hunt, so it seems he should be about ready.
The pigeons do get fed to Tyrone, sometimes. And the smaller ones go to the kittens and jaguarundi cub. They sneak into the bird cages (they are smallish brown pigeons) and peck away at the seed and fruit that the birds get. They make a mess, but the birds we have are the messiest eaters on earth anyhow (it seems like 90 percent of their seed ends up on the ground) so the pigeons contribution to the mess can be overlooked.But once they are in the bird cages, they have trouble getting out. So we go in, with a net and gloves, and capture the birdies. And then release them. Into the kittens’ enclosure. Or the tayra’s. Sometimes they survive a few days, one in the tayra’s cage survived almost a week. But in the end they always become food. And a lesson in hunting for the kittens and tayra.
The real problem though, is the mice. And a few mouse-rats. I’m not sure if they are mice or rats, we have seen two that are definitly rats but some of them just look like really really big mice. Maybe their just fat mice, or pregnant mice. We did find one that was pregnant (we know cause we saw the babies) but it still seemed pretty big for the mice we have here, even a pregnant one. Ususally the mice are just about the length of my pinky and actually quite cute but this one, although it still had a mouse-ish look to it, was about the size of my whole hand. Maybe she just had a very heavy pregnancy. Two of her babies were born, but maybe she was in the middle of it, they usually have more than two babies, right? So maybe she had some more inside of her making her expand from pinky-size to hand-size. Whatever.
The point is, the mice get into everything. Every single cage. And they eat everything. Even plastic. And they poop everywhere. And most of the animals wont catch them, even the supposed hunters. I think they are so small that the bigger animals can’t be bothered. And we have trouble catching them, we can’t use poison since they could eat it, stumble into some cage weaked by the poison, be caught and eaten by a monkey or a falcon and then poison their consumer. And we cant use regular traps for fear of catching the paw of some other animal. So we just set out buckets. Buckets and buckets and buckets. And we put seed inside of them, the old seed swept up off the ground from the macaws and galahs and cockatoos. And we wait. And in about 8 buckets we get maybe two mice every third day. It seems they always jump into the buckets in pairs. Maybe one jumps in, realizes it cant jump out, calls the other one who jumps in to help and then they are both stuck. One time we got three mice in one bucket. So in the bucket they have a pretty good life. They have a nice comfy bed of seed, which they can burrow in, eat, sleep on. One, the mama mouse-rat I mentioned before, even thought the seed bucket was the perfect place to have her babies. The only problem is when we discover them and they get a terrible death by cats. Or turtles. Did you know turtles eat baby mice? Yeah, we didn’t either, but they sure do. It might seem cruel, to release a mouse or mouse-rat into a cage with two kittens and a jaguarundi cub. Not much chance for the mouse, you’d think. They pounce and, although at first some mice got away, now they all are caught, played with, and then eaten. Unlike most house kittens these little kitties (Artemis and Hestia) won’t be the kind to leave dead mice or moles or voles by your doorstep as a present. They like to eat any mouse they catch. The whole mouse. I don’t know if they learned from the jaguarundi (Athena, and she is growing into her name, she is the fiercest kitten you’ve ever seen) or if they developed a taste for raw meat (since that is what we feed them) but they eat every bit of the mice. Anyway, it might seem cruel, and hypocritical, an animal rescue that catches and kills mice. But if the jaguarundi is going to be released someday, she has got to be a good hunter. And really, the mice have a pretty good life here, they get unlimited amounts of seed and fruit, and their predators, other than us and the two lazy house cats (not the kittens) are all in cages. It is just the few unlucky ones who jump into buckets and get a terrible death by kittens.
