Well, a couple of our drain tile lids were flipped last night. I don’t know how it happened. One of them was flipped and landed right side up and the other was upside down. The posts beside them were also out of place. The worm gear clamp obviously didn’t work on the one, so probably it doesn’t make sense to keep trying those.
Sena put the lids back on and put rocks on top of them. This is the second season for this mystery. It always happens at night and during the fall.
I still think some animal is responsible—and that includes human suspects. I doubt I’d catch anything on the critter cam, but I’m tempted.
Some of you may remember last year’s drain grate flipping saga in which something removed one of our back yard tile drain grates nearly every day for a while last fall. It’s happening again! This time it occurred during a pretty fierce heat wave which is still ongoing. It was so hot, the videos and photos we got were really hazy.
That adventure began in late September of 2022 and went on past the middle of October. I wrote a few posts about the saga. We set up a critter cam to see if we could get it on video. We caught deer running across the yard and that’s it, except for a UFO. Check our YouTube “Caught in the Critter Cam Lights” on October 17, 2022.
Yesterday, we noticed the drain grate was off again, after a nearly a year of no problems with it. Now, a couple of months ago, a couple of other drain grates popped off, but it looked like the explanation was heavy rainfall. The pipes were full of debris and the lid was very close to the edge of the pipes.
This time, the same lid that popped off last year popped off again and it was a replay of what looks like an ongoing mystery.
I’m not ready to set up the critter cam just yet. I’m a little unsure of whether it’ll work OK in triple digit heat.
Well, it’s day 3 and the drain tile grate has not popped off yet. I secured it with a worm gear adjustable clamp on October 1, 2022.
I had to fire the little zombie I posted to guard it. He was drinking blood on the job, gambling on zombie cribbage with a gang of putrid corpses, and making threats to cancel Halloween based on bogus orders from Dracula.
I hired a wolfman from the temp agency who seems more reliable. He carries a sword although I’m not sure why. His teeth are huge—for such a tiny werewolf. Don’t call him “Tiny” to his face. He has an inferiority complex.
If you laugh at him, he’ll surely shred your shoestrings. Quick, say that three times really fast right now!
We have this yard drainage tile system in our back yard. We have a half-dozen drain tile round grates over all of the pipes. One of them keeps turning up flipped over next to the pipe. It’s happened 3 days in a row.
The grate just slips into the pipe. Water pressure isn’t forcing it out. We think it’s maybe some kind of animal, Bigfoot, or an extraterrestrial messing with it.
According to the lawn and garden installer who supervised the job of laying the drain tile and pipe grates, the problem is either too much water through the pipe or critters. We’ve had no rain for the last 3 days yet we’ve found the grate upside down next to the pipe each of the 3 days.
I thought of getting a trail camera (critter cam) to catch whatever might be happening. But I’d have to order it because local hardware stores don’t carry them. We live in a residential area, but it’s a wooded lot. We commonly see squirrels, deer, wild turkeys, and even raccoons in our back yard.
If Bigfoot is messing with us, I could catch it on critter cam. That would be awesome.
So, it’s not impossible that an animal could be flipping the drain tile grate. But why? It’s always got water in it, and probably bugs. I think it would be easier for a critter to find water in the woods and bugs are flying around everywhere and on the trees.
I don’t think a human would flip the grate off. But if we had a critter cam, I could record it. They’re pretty expensive. I doubt Sena would let me order one. She’s going to try using sod pins to tether the grate.
Update: Sena put a couple sod pins in the grate to help secure it in the ground. She put some dirt around it so if a critter is messing with it, it’ll leave evidence. The rods are crossed with string around them to—confuse the critter?
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