Through no fault of my own, I had five dead blasted skunks scattered around my barnyard. What can I say? Shit happens.
Usually I clean them up ASAP. This time I let ’em sit while I pondered what kind of “sin” is attached to shooting a being that looks like a kitten.
Letting the situation “mellow” was an experiment. When I move fast (as I usually do), their chemical weaponry is still hanging in the air and I risk my clothes picking up a bit of it. This time it had been blistering hot and they all sorta’ mummified. It wasn’t daisies and roses but it could have been worse.
New technique evaluated and approved! If it’s very hot out and reasonably dry and the skunk wasn’t big, just come back a day later. Also, this is why I don’t live in a covenant controlled community.
(I’m a marketing genius! In order to build my blog audience I’ll discuss comparative experiences with dead skunks. What can go wrong?)
So I scooped up each one, with a generous portion of my raggedy ass lawn too… leaving a divot but hoping to remove contaminated soil while I was at it. I toss them all in the tractor bucket and…
and what?
I didn’t have an actual plan. Usually I bag ’em and truck ’em to the landfill. I had a bunch of stuff in Dodge’s truck bed so I’d switched to tractor without an end game. Lacking a designated skunk containment facility I just drove randomly into my swamp.
Eventually, I was in waist deep swamp grass growing out of dried muck. It’s a place I don’t expect to be walking anytime soon. I extended the bucket’s as far as I could get over deep impassible brush and dumped the bucket.
WHOOSH!
Out of nowhere a turkey flew up and it headed for the next county. You can’t blame it for fleeing. Some lunatic just attacked it with a tractor and skunks. Whoops!
Hassling turkeys is a solid “no” on my land. I encourage wild turkeys to stay in the hopes that they’ll multiply. (In fact I encourage any edible wildlife!) Turkeys pass through my land from time to time but don’t seem to hang around. There’s never enough to support good hunting odds for yours truly. I always hope they’ll breed up a bigger population so I can hunt up a Thanksgiving dinner.
Yet I just found a rare example of the breed and sent it running in terror. Dammit! I hope it wasn’t on an nest! If I dropped 5 dead skunks on a now abandoned turkey’s nest it’s going to seriously impact my wild turkey yelp reviews.
Curmudgeon’s Swamp: One Review: rating 2 stars out of 5
Plentiful water, decent tree cover nearby. Not a lot of human activity. No grazing livestock. Berry patch seems to be expanding. That one asshole ruffed grouse drums all night but the rest of the neighborhood is chill. Not many turkeys already here so it’s a bit lonely. Overall good cover and food but if you settle here you’ll have to deal with loneliness, coyotes, and the climate (it’s perhaps a bit too far north for winter survival). Good potential but not the greatest.
UPDATE: Rating reduced to 0 stars out of 5
The owner is a lunatic who drove a big mechanical beast into the swamp and dropped five dead skunks on my head! Avoid this place at all costs. I’m moving to Texas. Fuck that guy!
Some years ago, a bidness thing took me up to the Texas Hill Country. I ran behind schedule, and when I stopped at Anita’s place off near Wimberly I just nodded off in the truck, since she didn’t answer a knock and there was no cell service. So I woke up in the back of my Subhuman to the gurgle of maybe 30 wild turkey and 3 families of white-tailed deer
Could have been worse. Instead of a turkey it could have been a couple of lesbian squirrels hanging around with a bear.