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.
Well, on Saturday morning we noticed that a different drain tile grate was flipped in our back yard. Same problem as the other one that I blogged about last year. I put the wormhole gear clamp back on the other one and so far, so good.
Now I’m considering getting another clamp for the other grate.
I can think of a few animals around here that might be guilty of flipping grates: deer, feral cats, dogs, raccoons, and the like. We did catch a big raccoon on video up in the Mulberry tree a couple months ago. On the other hand, it’s not happening to our new neighbor’s grate.
I can’t rule out some kid pulling a prank on us. But I wouldn’t know who it is. As I may have mentioned last year, there aren’t any young kids in the immediate neighborhood.
I’m considering setting up our critter cam again. You never know. I might catch an extraterrestrial on camera.
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!
So far so good. After I affixed the drain grate to the corrugated base with a worm gear adjustable clamp, this morning the lid is still on.
I also posted a tiny zombie guard. He’ll chew up anything that tries to come up from below or break in from above. He’s not fussy about what he eats. He doesn’t sleep. He’s not scared of anything. Bad weather doesn’t bother him. He says the same thing Beetlejuice says:
“I’ll eat anything you want me to eat, I’ll swallow anything you want me to swallow; so, come on down, I’ll chew on a dog!”
The tile grain grate in our back yard popped off again last night. One of the landscaping pins Sena used to secure it was bent and the other pin came out when the lid was flipped. The grate is always flipped upside down. Sena wondered if something might have pushed it up and over from inside the drain.
That would pretty much rule out Bigfoot, but something is flipping our lid.
It might be a rodent head-butting the grate from inside. Or it could still be a raccoon, picking it up with its fingers from above, either by the lip or the slots. We’ve never seen the culprit.
We have seven of these grates in our back yard but only one gets messed with. I’m not sure I want to spend $30 on a critter cam. You can order them through Walmart. They can run off several AA batteries. I suppose I could try to mount the camera to a support post under the sun room. I’m still not sure if it would have the range to capture something several yards away. And they’re not available in the stores, not even in Fin and Feather. Local rental stores don’t carry them.
I searched the web for animal control service and it’s difficult to find. In most instances, there’s a professional you could hire for a minimum charge of $100-$500 or more—if you know what animal you want removed. Other options include the dog shelter or the police. The pros have an advertising strategy which naturally steer you to their own service.
We don’t even know what is flipping our lid.
Our options are limited.
We could try to duct tape things together. It’s not ideal and I’d probably get the tape all bunched up.
We could try getting a worm gear adjustable clamp that would fit around the pipe that the lid fits inside of and cinch it tight.
We could screw the lid to the pipe. That would probably solve the problem but we’d like to be able to remove it easily.
I could stay up all night with the yard light on and try to catch the critter in the act. That might lead to a more focused solution. It might also lead to me just nodding off in the chair, no matter how much coffee I drink. And if an extraterrestrial is involved, I might get abducted and then I’d be screwed, literally. That probing routine has got to be a violation of intergalactic law.
Get a critter cam and get a picture of the perpetrator.
Which of the options would you pick? Any other suggestions?
Update: We opted for the worm gear adjustable clamp. Sena found one at Menards that’s a little over 7 inches in diameter. It cinched down enough that I couldn’t lift off the lid. Let’s see if a critter can figure out how to knock that lid off now.
She found a few other things for me to do while I was out there: got rid of a couple of basketball-sized wasp nests using a blowtorch. After I rebuilt the house which burned to the ground, I had to check for Bigfoot turds in the yard and I slipped on one, cracked my sacroiliac, got it fixed at the ER and when I got back home, I had to throw some sod on a bare spot in the yard that was about as big as a football field but I persevered nevertheless and watered it down but got soaked to the skin and had to dry off by doing a few hundred wind sprints between Iowa City and Des Moines. Next up was to heft a few dozen bags of dirt and mulch to the back 40 where Sena’s building a city park; the Ferris wheel is on backorder—all this before dinner.
Go Retire Psychiatrist 