There’s a chipmunk in my office building. A bold chipmunk. “I saw it in your office,” my co-worker said, “we just kinda stared at each other. Then it ran away.” We work in an old house full of tempting holes for critters. Mr. Chippy is neither the first nor the last. Dead mice abound. Live ones at least have the good sense to hide. The braver of us bag the dead ones up like dog poop and throw them away. A year ago there was a cat living under someone’s office. Once, a family of birds camped out in the bathroom vent. Holes are plugged but soon, another hole appears. It’s like trying to plug a dam with your finger.
One morning the chipmunk was dead. In the office. They were summarily disposed of in the aforementioned dog poop manner. An email went out: “hey, just FYI…” Some of us were a little sad. I was happy that the chipmunk had the grace to die out in the open, where we could dispose of them, rather than in the walls like that one time. It was probably a small animal, but the smell punched you right in the nose like Bigfoot crawled in the wall and perished. The awful stench lasted for weeks before maintenance folks showed up with saws and weird orange air freshener.
I used to work in a building by the creek. Snakes slithered in through the door facing the water. Tiny ones, but still. I took the snow shovel and wung them out in the grass. Winging animals back outside is my favorite form of pest control, because you don’t have to touch anything gross and it’s amusing to watch them fly. If I find a mouse in a trap I gingerly pick it up by the wooden part and wing it into the brush. The vultures can figure it out. I’m not touching it. I’ll be feeling phantom dead mouse on my fingertips for days.
The snake building also had issues with crickets. Crickets are nice when they’re outside where God intended. An errant cricket inside is like when the smoke alarm starts its “change my battery” beep. Chirp…chirp…chirp. And then as soon as you think you’ve solved the problem…chirp. Until you kill it with a broom handle. The cricket or alarm, doesn’t matter. Now that I think about it I should have been so quick to wing the snake back outside. It could have taken care of the cricket.
I walked into the office one day and heard a distinctive chipmunk sound. I tried to talk myself out of it…maybe my sneakers were wet and squeaky. But then…chirp. Well. We though Mr. Chippy died the week before but here we are again. I checked my bag to make sure he wasn’t munching on my sandwich and signed into my computer. After awhile a scrabbling from my closet and then, there he was, giving me the side eye. He scrabbled back in before I could make a move. My boss came back and we told her of Mr. Chippy’s return. She came into my office with a wooden dowel and poked at the closet. After awhile: “Chirp! Eeek!” Chippy fled. My boss called maintenance.
Their assessment: too much brush and a tree to close to the building. The chipmunks were nesting in the soffits—whatever those are. Like, I know they’re near the roof but not part of the roof and occasionally they need to be addressed. Like when there’s a nest. The brush totally needed to be cleared—we had some raggedy ass bushes. But the other answer was to cut down, with mass prejudice, everyone’s favorite tree: a beautiful Japanese maple.
I don’t really mind chipmunks. Unless I’m walking with the dog and she gets distracted and pulls me into a tree. Or when the dog spends an afternoon barking at a drainpipe because…chipmunk! But, staring at the pale naked stump of our former glorious tree, I started to hate chipmunks, just a little bit.
Then, too late, we found out from my boss’s environmentally conscious husband that chipmunks, don’t, in fact, climb trees. The Japanese Maple died for nought. Tragic. But, this eliminated my hatred of chipmunks and placed my ire squarely where it belongs: on the squirrels.
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