Skunks and Other Adventures

 

About a month ago (the day before Halloween) I went to town with Andrew.  I went to the quilt shop and library while he was in meetings.  When we got home that night we walked into our house…our house has a mud room on one end (which is where we entered in) and our bedroom is on the other side of the house.  Well anyway, we walked into mud room and this horrible stench came wafting at us.  As we walked to our bedroom the smell got worse and worse.  When we walked into our bathroom we were pretty much dry-heaving it was so revolting.  It smelled like skunk and dead rotting animal.

To back up a little bit…a few weeks before I was in our bedroom and I heard this scratching sound coming from the walls of our bathroom.  I told Andrew about it when he got home from work and he just told me it was a mouse.  I told him it sounded like huge claws!  There is no way it was a mouse.  So he went outside and took off the boards covering the access points to under our house. He got a flashlight and crawled in there a little ways and suddenly came out really fast.  He said there was a skunk staring at him.  So we set up a trap to kill the skunk, and a few days later we caught it!  We left a plate of tuna fish under there to see if anything else would it eat and then we could trap whatever else was under there. 

The tuna fish never got eaten so we figured there was nothing else under there.  Well, lets just say we were wrong…way wrong. 

Back to the horrible stench in our bathroom.  Andrew called the maintenance guy for the ranch and told him that something died in our wall and that he was going to rip out the dry wall to get it out.  The maintenance guy told us to try taking out the vanity mirror on the wall and see if we could it from there. 

After pulling out the vanity Andrew could see there was a skunk dead between our walls.  He pulled it out and put it in a trash bag.  Only one problem…it had been dead in there for awhile and didn’t smell anymore!  Which means there was still something else in our wall rotting!!  WHAT?!!  I don’t know how the people who lived here before us lived with that smell because that other skunk had to have died when they lived here. 

So Andrew pulls out the heater in the wall and starts looking around and sees another skunk…ANOTHER skunk in our wall!  He couldn’t stand the smell of it..so this is what we came up with to help block the smell away…

A hanger and gloves to grab the skunk with…a bucket for Andrew to throw up in (if need be) and a dish towel with essential oils on it to block the smell haha

Well after some time he finally got it out of the wall and buried it out in the horse pasture.  Our bedroom and bathroom smelled for over a week like a dead rotting skunk.  We haven’t heard any scratching sounds in our wall lately luckily haha.

There are also four great horned owls that live in the trees around our house.  It’s so neat being able to hear them from our window at night and in the morning.  Plus, I am sure they are helping keep the rodents down around our house too! 

Sorry the picture is blurry (the owl kept moving)

We also saw some Wild Horses up the Steen Mountain Loop Road!  We saw a little group near the bottom, then after driving a ways we saw another huge group further up.