Building the Hogan

credits - Anthony Falbo - Falboarts.com

The plateau at first glance seems to be entirely free of wildlife.  There are miles of nothing but sagebrush and native grasses no taller than your waist.  You can scan from horizon to horizon and see little but a few hawks, crows and mountain bluebirds that thrive in the New Mexican desert.  But the birds presence tells the true story.  Where there are crows, and especially hawks, you know that wildlife thrives below. 

This is certainly the case on our land.  When we arrived in late winter/early spring we saw little evidence of the plentiful wildlife.  We heard about the possibility of migrating elk, which we never saw, and only a chance siting of a coyote crossing the dirt road gave us an indication of what might lay beneath the snow.

The first signs of life came from inside the little shed the previous owner had built.  In the middle of all this land, it was undoubtedly a beacon to those nesting and burrowing animals who wished to survive the harsh winter winds.  Sure enough we found nesting mice comfortably wrapped in shredded twine at the rear of the building.  We encouraged them to leave with a couple of raps of the shovel on the floor and they soon showed us their entrance, which we subsequently closed up.

The mice were by no means alone.

Upon arriving to work one day as the snow was nearly melted we discovered a family of jackrabbits feeding near the shed.  As we approached, the bunnies scurried under the building to their den, which turns out has no less than five exits.  We filled or blocked four of them and waited to see if they would make a frightened exit from the fifth.  No such exit was forthcoming, and they outlasted our alloted time and patience waiting for them. 

I’ve had several encounters with the bunnies since then, chasing them as fast as my legs will take me, but I’m nowhere near fast enough to run down an adult jackrabbit.  For that matter, as Alice learned the hard way, I should probably not go chasing rabbits.  For now they get to stay, if for no other reason than out of respect for their tenacity.  When we put in the garden, all bets are off.  The rabbits will have to go.

New Mexico quite possibly has the biggest ant population on the planet, and I say this as someone who is experienced with ants.  In central Texas the fire ant problem is no laughing matter and people spend lots of time and money trying to get rid of them.  There are fire ants in Taos, too.  Lots of them.  But there are also a wide variety of other species in all shapes in sizes from the nearly microscopic to the ones we’ve nicknamed the “giant mutants”.  I’ve actually had to pull off the road on the way back from Taos to shake off some of these mega-ants who’d crawled up my pant legs.

As I was saying, getting rid of ants is no easy task and we’re only part way through our experiments at pushing them away from the house area.   We’ve tried digging up the nest, and therefore destroying the queens chamber, but that has only had limited results.   We tried flooding them out, but being short on water and seemingly home to colonies of experienced swimmers, we quickly abandoned that idea.  We even tried some of the commercial ant poison on a couple of the mounds, but that had no noticeable effect either.  We’re beginning to think we’ve encountered a race of super ants, bred hardy by surviving on the plateau, or perhaps made super resistant by consuming large quantities of this magical soil.

Until they become a bigger problem we’re content to let them exist outside the garden walls.

The same cannot be said for the biggest and most intrusive of our pests, the so-called “rat with a shovel” or the notorious prairie dog.  It’s hard to be angry with the prairie dogs.  The furry little mammals are actually cute in a family pet kind of way so it’s hard to contemplate annihilating them.  From the start we resolved that we’d push them off into the hundreds of acres of government land that surrounds us.  Let the government deal with them.

They turned out to be more resilient than we bargained for.

Each time we visit the land we close up their holes.  All of them.  We even stuff them with rocks that should be too big to be moved by the diminutive tunnel dwellers, but in each case we are reminded of their resourcefulness.  We come back to find a new hole dug just a few meters away, and sometimes, somehow they actually manage to dislodge the boulders.  One day when we arrived one of the little pests was sitting atop his hole - or so I thought - and I threw a rock at it in frustration.  To my surprise the animal, which turned its head and gave me one of those “drop dead” looks, turned out to be a hawk that was “hole sitting” - or waiting for a prairie dog to pop its little head up.  He gave me a disgusted look and flew away - as if to tell me that I could deal with them myself.

We’ve looked into some of the humane ways of ridding ourselves of them such as trapping, or using pepper mixtures, but for now we’ll continue to push them northward until one of us gives in.  We’re betting it’s them.