July,  2007

Dear Friends:

I found this postcard showing a couple of muskrats, and I had to smile: I just had a weird episode involving a muskrat behind my home in Limestone. We have a small pond behind the house, with lots of vegetation and some gold fish, and many very noisy frogs. Unless a blue heron shows up like several years back and cleans out this little waterhole, eating all the fish and frogs, life seems to be perfect in there. A few weeks ago I saw a fairly large animal swim in the pond; by the way it moved and the little I could see of its tail, I thought it was a beaver. Naturally I always thought beavers live in creeks, not in tiny ponds, so I started looking on the Internet, to find out what else looks similar to a beaver. Eventually I found out that we had a muskrat! The natives call these creatures “the dumb brother of the beaver”. They are total vegetarians; eat grasses, roots of plants, cattails and so on. These animals are a lot larger than a rat, and have a long flat tail.   So I left him alone, I have no problem having a muskrat sharing my “lillipad”.

Our resident muskrat

One morning my dog chased him. It seems the muskrat was taking trips back and forth to another little pond, which is located close to the woods.  Our dog Nikki kept going to the same spot close to the house wall, all the time looking at me. Well, being curious, I followed her to the grate-covered light shaft of a basement window. There, in the corner, sat a shaking muskrat. Okay, how does one handle a muskrat? They do have nasty teeth, just like a beaver. I could not leave the poor animal in there. So, with a five gallon bucket and a net, I finally managed to push him into the bucket and rescue him. After a close look at the little guy, I was surprised what beautiful fur he has. No wonder these creatures are hunted and trapped so much! I carried him down to the second small pond, and hoped he would stay there.

However, he had other ideas; he moved to the third pond, which is huge. Jim had dug it three years ago with his backhoe; it took him several years to complete it. We both love water, and so do our moose, bear and other wildlife. This big pond has a pretty wide dam around it; after all we don’t want the neighbors to flood out. Anyway, I noticed that the muskrat now has a mate, and moved with her, or him to the big pond, dug a tunnel into the dam, and lives there. According to the article on the Internet, muskrats do a lot of damage to dams around ponds. Chances are that we will be in serious trouble sometime in the future, when they tunnel too far into the dam and cause the water to run on the neighbors' land. I hope not; I sure would like to leave in peace with the rats and the neighbors .

Now you know all about life in Limestone. I think you are probably more interested in “life at the Shelter” so we move on. We saved two more lives this month. The first one is a beautiful hound, which had been rescued out of the BAD shelter I have written about before, by a lady who has pulled out dogs there previously. It seems that things did not work out for “Gabby” [see photo below], short for Gabrielle. What a terrible name for a dog, it’s bad enough that a human, like me for instance, has to live with a name like that J. And we all know that dogs don’t “gab” ! There was a bad dogfight at the lady’s house, caused by another very aggressive dog. Gabby ended up with a bad bite wound in her leg, and since the lady's husband did not want the aggressive one or the hound around anymore, she ended up at our Shelter. Gabby is a very sweet girl, still young, maybe a year or two old. She loves people and other dogs. She has seen our vet, Dr. Slack, for her shots, and is scheduled to be spayed by the end of this week. So if you know of someone who will give the dog a new home and a new name, we sure would appreciate it!

Then there is Elli [see photo below], a beautiful Yellow Lab; she's only about a year old. It seems that the family who had Ellie spent no time at all with her; she was tied up out back, and evidently got nasty to one of the kids in the family. I know Labs are normally very gentle dogs; so I don’t know if she has been so badly abused that she started to bite, or what exactly happened. The people decided to have her killed, and took her to the vet. The vet technician, who knows our Ted, called him, saying she felt this dog should have another chance, and should NOT be put down. So Ellie is at Charley’s Strays, learning manners from Jessica, Mike’s newly wedded wife. Right now she is not adoptable, but we hope with enough TLC and time she eventually will be a welcome addition to a new home.

Gabby

Jim spent a couple of weeks at the Shelter, again, this month. He  is almost finished with the front runs. The concrete is poured and straightened out as well as possible – a very hot day dried it way too fast, even before the concrete truck got the last of the cement poured out of the truck. Jim said it was a terribly difficult job for him and Mike, who helped, because the cement set so fast. He still has to repair the small walls →

Ellie

between the individual runs, grind down some of the uneven cement, and that should be it for this year. The cement cost $800, and with all the steel, renting the jackhammer and so on, there is no $$ to do the inside of the barn this year, contrary to what we had planned. Hopefully no more discarded dogs show up on our doorsteps, looking for a home for winter, we’re filled up.

CAT REPORT – July 2007

My, it’s nice again not to have a lot of news about our good little cats!  They’re all doing fine (knock on wood). The weather has been reasonable enough so that I haven’t even used a lot of electricity to run the air conditioner for Robin, Agnes and the funny-foot family upstairs. It’s been on a few times for cooling, and there’ve been a couple days when I’ve run it to try to reduce the humidity. It was either that or spend the evening drying cats with towels!  J 

Tippy came back for a visit while Jennifer (the young woman who adopted her this spring) went to a wedding. She camped out with her former roommate, Purina/Meg, and Purina’s new roommate, Smoky, whom Tippy emphatically did not like. No fights, but unless Smoky stayed at the far end of the room he got hissed at.  Otherwise, Tippy was fine; she ate well her whole stay and seemed glad to see me. When Jennifer came to get her, she resisted getting into the carrier; but Jen e-mailed me that as soon as they got home and she sat down, Tippy was in her lap.

Christopher is done with his antibiotic, still off his medicine, still skinnier than he should be, but feeling fine. The last time I weighed him (he’s about due again), he’d gained a few ounces since Dr. Macmillan weighed him, even allowing for the difference between the vet’s scales and mine. Chris is the only fairly young cat I have who often fails to use the litter box. Every time I clean up one of his messes, I wonder why I work so hard to keep him healthy; then he patters over and climbs onto my knee and purrs, and I stop wondering.

As always, I’m grateful to all of you who help support Charley’s Strays, and especially to the cats’ friends: the entire Parent family, Olivia Charles, Roberta Chaves for more coupons, my neighbor Janice, who dropped off dry food the other day, and the to-me-anonymous people who send coupons that Gabriele forwards to me. Many thanks!

ADA Fencing, Palmyra

Beverly Maheu, China Village

Carole Parker, Stoughton

 Cathy O’Connor, Winslow

Cristine Cardello, Melrose

Cindy Houston, Woburn

Dale Critchley, S. Weymouth

Donna Bering, Lynn

Doris Lary, Hartland

Dorothy D’Alessandro, Ossip.

Dorothy Eckstein, Medford

Dorothy Watkins, Amesbury

Dorothye Andrews, Warwick

Elizabeth Johnson, Sanford

Enid Hayes, Halifax

Florence Mason, Lexington

Harriet Snyder, Brockton

Inge Maiellano, Marblehead

Iris Martinello, Tewksbury

Irma Simon, S. China

Jackie Lowney, New Bedford

James Lavita, Dennis

Jean Catignani, Conway

Joan Ryan, New Bedford

Jon & Barb Anderson, Augusta

Joseph D’Alessandro, Tuftonboro

Joseph Arouca, Ormond Beach

Joseph Blake, New Bedford

Josephine Ford, Holden

Judy & Al Smith, Belmont

Judy Rohweder, Northport

Katherine Collins, S. Barre

Gabriele, Mary, Karen, Jessica, Ted, Mike and Jim

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