Creek Bends: Happy Invasive Species Week
Late winter is a great time to hack, burn, shoot, and begin trapping
I think the hodge-podge in the back of the Pathfinder makes sense only to me.
It holds a “holy bucket” with a new cable on it; a bag of deer corn; a weed burner; a drip torch; a bag containing Jell-O packets, Hawaiian Punch, and cat food; RoundUp; a box with four spankin’ new dog-proof raccoon traps, cables, and six golf balls; a chainsaw; my “hack-pack” that holds a hatchet, limb loppers and a saw; and an AR-15.
Watch out, Snake Creek! Here I come.
Happy National Invasive Species Awareness Week, the annual multi-agency event to raise awareness about invasive species.
The targets on the hit list range from feral hogs to Japanese honeysuckle, Sericea lespedeza, and redcedars. We are blessed not to have Chinese privet on the property but cursed with the Tree of Heaven. Learn about these and other Oklahoma problem species at the National Invasive Species Information Center.
Late winter is perfect for this kind of work. Vegetation is knocked down by snow and a winter of rain-freeze-thaw, so anything green or white stands out. It’s a great time to spot redcedars, Callery pears, Japanese honeysuckle, and privet. They are almost the only green things out there.
Some caution is required; you must know the difference between a stinkin’ Callery pear tree and a fabulous Mexican plum or serviceberry, but it’s easy to learn. Some briars are starting to green up, and so are some elms, but at least in eastern Oklahoma, the green is easy to ID, and the pickins are clear to see.
I walked the Snake Creek property the other day and cut 43 redcedars. I was surprised at how many I spotted less than three feet tall and astounded at how many I saw in the 6- to 8-foot category after I cut down so many last season.
Raccoons aren’t an invasive species, but they are plentiful. More about the traps later.
(Yep! I’m brewing sweet/soured corn for the “holy bucket” and pigs again.)
Prescribed fire frustrations
The red and green chart of the Mesonet OK-Fire app first graced a bookmarked page on my iPhone around Christmastime, and it’s still there. I swear, prescribed burn conditions have been impossible. It has been too wet or windy since the first week in January, with nothing in between.
It’s a convenient app for planning a prescribed burn. Set the conditions you want (I go with parameters for “beginning burners.” It’s a handy starting point, but knowing our valley leans to the moist side and is protected from the wind, I push the allowable wind speed up to 20 mph (allowing anything from South Southeast to West) and knock the relative humidity down to at 70% percent, but no lower than 25% instead of 40 and 80, for burning the meadow.
The page generates a table with my desired parameters against the weather conditions for the next 84 hours. Green means go. Red means, well, I look down the list and see why it’s red, and if I agree, then it’s a no-go.
It shows green Saturday afternoon this week, but I’m skeptical. We have a handy ½-acre test patch to burn, but I think that 60% humidity on the chart is more like 75 or 80% in the valley. I do have a brush pile that should burn nicely.
Conversely, it shows red for Sunday, not because of wind speeds up to 20 mph but because, for reasons I can’t understand, it predicts increasing relative humidity and higher dead-fuel-moisture readings despite clear skies and no precipitation in the forecast.
I love the Mesonet, but the nearest monitors to our spot are Pryor and Tallequah. Neither is particularly close, and both are situated on markedly different terrain.
The index is just a gauge I can learn to read. Whether it’s exact to my location is less critical than its consistency.
I’ll light a fire this weekend and see what happens. If it doesn’t burn much, I can light another match later.
Trapping raccoons
My wife, DeAnna, loves raccoons, and I can hear her pleading, “Ohhhh, Kelly, nooo,” as she reads this.
I’m ready to do some trapping for the first time since I left Alaska 15 years ago. Some may be surprised I’m inspired to go this route on the advice of the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation.
I was astounded after baiting pigs for a couple of years, watching the trail camera, and seeing just how many raccoons piled in. Once, I counted at least 16 raccoons around a bait bucket and a little side pile of fermented corn. They found it the first night.
I spoke with Jared Davis, the Wildlife Department furbearer biologist, about what I saw. He was not surprised. He said it was probably several family groups from the ridge and that another family or two likely have homes on the 50 acres. If surrounding properties are not targets of trappers or coon hound runners, there are more.
Opossums, skunks, coyotes, and especially raccoon populations increased markedly in suitable habitat areas in recent decades. No one argues that. Times when every other family down the block had a couple of coon hounds, and kids ran their local trap lines before school are things of the past.
It’s hard to imagine it hasn’t had some kind of impact on wild turkeys and quail. Emphasis on “some kind.”
Biologists are often ripped for promoting good habitat management over predator control.
Trapping as a land management tool, rather than a source of income or part-time outdoor pursuit, is a relatively new concept. To its credit, our state Wildlife Department created training sessions as it recognized the demand and possible benefits.
Let me emphasize that, too. “Possible benefits.”
Training sessions began humbly three years ago. This year, Davis said three different sessions in different parts of the state filled up Ticketmaster-rush style.
“We did three sessions this year and will probably do more next year. We’ve had a lot of interest and great feedback,” he said.
Decision time
A talk this past summer with former Oklahoma upland game biologist Dwayne Elmore led me to decide that Snake Creek could do with fewer raccoons and that I should re-hone my trapping skills.
Elmore is heading up the game bird program at the Tall Timbers on the Florida-Georgia line.
We talked during a wild turkey habitat day sponsored by the Muskogee-Creek, Choctaw, and Cherokee nations, Turkeys for Tomorrow, the Wildlife Department, and Oklahoma State University Cooperative Extension.
According to Elmore and Davis, good grassland and forest habitats are still the primary concerns for ground-nesting birds.
“Without good habitat, you’re not going to have birds, regardless,” Elmore said.
He said it is not uncommon for landowners to report that they trap one raccoon for every three to five acres they own, and it’s not unusual for landowners to say they’ve seen more birds as a result.
He couched that observation in caution, however.
“Before you go into it, know that we don’t have a high confidence level to tell you it will matter for your turkeys,” he said. “It probably does under certain circumstances, but the level of effort it may take to see an effect might be more than you’re ready, willing, or able to do. And some of you will have to ask yourself if you have the stomach to kill a hundred raccoons a year.”
Elmore said he started “intensive, strategic” trapping on his land after exhausting all the other habitat features he knew to address. (and he knows them all)
Based on camera surveillance, he also knew that nest-hatching success was low and that it was usually due to predation of some kind. So, they hit that property daily for 30 days before nesting season.
“It’s specifically timed and intensive,” he said. “Not everybody can do this for two hours every morning for three weeks, but that’s what it can take.”
He acknowledged that it’s easy to assume that increased nest predator populations hurt ground-nesting birds.
“It may have,” he said. “But we don’t know.”
“I’m not saying, ‘Don’t trap because we don’t know,’ but there are many other things we can tell you to do for turkey management that we absolutely know will help. With trapping, it’s more uncertainty and a lot of effort.”
Amen, brother.
The long game
Given those cautions and my limited time, will trapping at Snake Creek help the birds this year? No, but it will allow me to prepare to do a better job down the road.
We are working on the habitat picture at Snake Creek and playing the long game. I think it’s apparent trapping will play a role. It will take me some time to get back into the groove of trapping and learning to be effective. This will be a learning year. I haven’t trapped or skinned a raccoon in 40 years.
So, best to start now.
It’s time to camp, burn, hack redcedars, trap raccoons, bait pigs, and spray the Japanese honeysuckle.
There won’t be any golfing, though. The golf balls sit on the top of the cylindrical dog-proof trap. Ideally, they fit in the hole to target the dexterous raccoons that want the cat food bait inside and avoid catching skunks and opossums. It’s a great little trick, or so I’m told.
Eventually, we will trap the others, too, but I don’t want to begin re-honing my fur-skinning skills on a skunk. That would be just my luck.
My wife loves skunks, too; she had one as a pet when she was little.