Bunk’s skunk & varmint removal

04/18/2026

Cats will roam!

Sometime in the fall of 2009, a young male cougar left the Black Hills of South Dakota and started walking east.
He was around a year and a half old. About 140 pounds. He had been born into a population of roughly 250 breeding cougars in the Black Hills, one of the only viable mountain lion populations left in the center of the continent. Young males his age disperse when it is time to find territory and a mate. They usually travel about a hundred miles.
He traveled seventeen hundred.
Biologists were able to reconstruct his route afterward because he left a trail. Not tracks. DNA. His blood was collected in Minnesota in late 2009. His hair was found in Wisconsin. His s**t was identified three separate times across the state over the following months. Citizen trail cameras photographed him in Wisconsin and Michigan. Each sample was stored. Each sample matched.
He crossed Minnesota. He crossed Wisconsin. He passed through Michigan. He crossed into New York. He kept going.
Nobody knows why he did not stop. Cougars do not typically cross the Mississippi. They do not walk through states that have not held a resident cougar in a century. They do not cross highways and suburbs and farmland for two years straight. This one did.
By June 2011, he had reached Connecticut.
No mountain lion had been confirmed in Connecticut since 1880. A hundred and thirty-one years. The eastern cougar, the subspecies that had once lived in every state from Maine to Georgia, had been declared extinct. The forests where they had hunted for thousands of years were still standing. The deer they had eaten were more abundant than ever. The only thing missing from the landscape was the cougar itself.
And then one walked back in.
He was spotted first in Greenwich, near the coast, in early June. Then he moved inland. On June 11, 2011, he was crossing the Wilbur Cross Parkway in Milford when an SUV hit him. The driver was not hurt. The cougar died on the road.
When officials examined the body, they assumed he was an escaped pet. A wild cougar in Connecticut was impossible. Then the lab results came back from Missoula, Montana. He was not an escaped pet. He was not neutered. He was not declawed. He had no microchip. He had porcupine quills embedded under his skin from somewhere along the journey. He was a wild cougar from the Black Hills of South Dakota who had walked for two years across half the continent, alone, through territory no cougar had crossed in living memory, and he had made it all the way to within a few miles of the Atlantic Ocean.
A mammal ecologist from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources said afterward that the cat had been looking for a mate. "He was looking for love in all the wrong places," he said.
There was nothing wrong with the places. The forests of New England are cougar habitat. The deer are there. The terrain is there. The only thing that is not there is another cougar.
He walked seventeen hundred miles to find one.
He was the only one who came.

04/15/2026

The best mosquito control in your yard isn't a spray, a candle, or a bug zapper.

It's a bat. Bats hunt flying insects from dusk to dawn — and a small backyard colony can clear thousands of moths, beetles, and mosquitoes in a single night without chemicals or electricity.

But bats don't stay in yards that don't feed them. Most of the flowers in a typical garden close at sunset, which means the yard goes dark right when bats start hunting. The insects bats chase — moths especially — gather at white, fragrant flowers that open after dark.

A garden that blooms at night is a garden that keeps bats working overhead.

🌙 Five night-blooming plants that turn your yard into a bat feeding station:

- Moonflower — large white trumpets that unfurl at dusk and attract sphinx moths, one of the heaviest night-flying insects bats intercept in open air

- Nicotiana (flowering to***co) — tubular white flowers that release heavy fragrance only after sunset. The taller varieties draw more moth traffic than dwarf types

- Evening primrose — yellow cups that open visibly at sunset. You can watch the petals unfold in real time. They attract beetles and moths through the first hours of darkness

- Four o'clocks — open in late afternoon and bridge the gap between daytime pollinators and nighttime feeders. The shift-change plant that keeps insects present as bats emerge

- Night-scented stock — small and unremarkable during the day, but after dark it opens into a fragrance that moths follow from a distance. Plant it near where you sit outside and it does double duty

Add a south-facing bat house on a pole or building wall — bats need a roosting surface that absorbs daytime heat. A birdbath or any water source within a short distance completes the setup.

The bat doesn't need a house. It needs a reason to stay 🦇

04/15/2026

Hello. I'm the bird walking headfirst down your oak trunk.

Not up. Down.

I'm a White-breasted Nuthatch — and I'm the only bird in your yard that routinely forages by descending. Woodpeckers go up. Creepers spiral up. I go down. And I find the insects they miss.

When a woodpecker climbs a trunk, it looks into the crevices from below. When I walk down, I look into those same crevices from above. Different angle. Different prey. We share the same tree and never compete because we're searching opposite surfaces of every crack in the bark.

I weigh about as much as four nickels. My feet have one large toe facing backward and three facing forward — I move one foot at a time, keeping the backward toe locked into the bark as an anchor. I don't need my tail to brace me. I just grip and walk.

My mate and I hold this territory year-round. We don't migrate. We don't leave. We chase other nuthatches out and we know the alarm calls of every chickadee and titmouse in the neighborhood, because we winter with them in a foraging guild.

You hear me every day and don't know it. A nasal yank yank yank from somewhere on the trunk. That's me, telling her where I am.

🌿 Where to find me:

- Any mature deciduous tree — oaks especially
- Look for the bird going the wrong direction on the trunk
- At your feeder, I grab one sunflower seed and fly away to crack it on a branch

The bird doing everything backwards is doing it on purpose. 🐦

04/15/2026

Who doesn't love songbirds?

04/13/2026

I am proud to announce that I have been certified to take coyotes.

Spring is the time of year when most animals will bare their offspring and the coyotes are no exception. As they raise their young their quest to feed them will intensify. So it is important to be extra vigilant about the whereabouts of your pets and livestock.
Also make sure that you poultry coops are shored up
Feel free to contact me if you have any questions or concerns and I would be more than happy to help you
May you all have a safe and uneventful Spring.

04/12/2026

This is true!

Coyote pups are born in April and early May, and once that happens the adults are under a lot more pressure to bring food back to the den. Wildlife sources say both parents help care for the pups. This is one reason coyotes can are bolder this time of year, especially around yards, barns, and neighborhoods where easy food is close by.

So be careful, this is the time of year a coyote will come right up near a porch, slip through a yard, and grab an outside cat without thinking twice. Free-roaming cats and small unattended dogs are vulnerable to coyotes, and conflicts with dogs can get worse during breeding and denning season when coyotes get more territorial and protective. Spring is when a lot of people suddenly realize those coyotes they hear at night are not just “passing through.” They are hunting harder because now they have pups to feed.

— Stephen Ziegler
Outdoor writer | Member, Hunter Nation

03/30/2026

The easiest conservation project in the world:

A broken flower pot.
Turned upside down.
In a shady spot.

That's a toad house.

HOW TO BUILD IT:
→ Take a broken terracotta pot (or break one intentionally — the chip is the door)
→ Turn it upside down
→ Partially bury it in soil or mulch in a shady, damp spot
→ The opening should be big enough for a toad to enter (~3 inches)
→ Place near a garden or compost pile (food source)
→ Add a shallow water dish nearby

That's it.

Cost: $0
Time: 30 seconds
Skill required: none

WHAT YOU GET:
→ A resident toad that eats 10,000+ insects per season
→ Slugs, mosquitoes, beetles, ants, cutworms, grubs
→ Free, silent, chemical-free pest control
→ Toads are loyal — they return to the same shelter year after year
→ They're nocturnal, so you'll barely see them
→ But you'll NOTICE the difference in your garden

WHERE TO PLACE:
→ Shady, damp area (under a bush, near a hose, by the compost)
→ NOT in direct sun (toads overheat easily)
→ Near a water source (toads hydrate through their SKIN)
→ Away from areas you spray pesticides (obviously)

A broken pot you were going to throw away.

30 seconds of your time.

10,000 fewer mosquitoes per year.

The best deal in conservation. 🐸
#$0Project

03/30/2026

The earthworm under your lawn has five hearts, no eyes, no lungs, and no brain as you'd recognize one.

She has a nerve cord that runs the length of her body with a cluster of ganglia at the front that processes input from light-sensitive cells in her skin. She can detect light and dark but can't form images. She navigates entirely by touch, vibration, moisture gradient, and chemical sensing. She's been doing this for 600 million years — 350 million years before the first dinosaur walked.

Tonight she'll come to the surface. She anchors her tail in her burrow with tiny bristles called setae and extends her front end across the soil, sweeping an arc as wide as her body length — 6 inches — eating everything in reach. She consumes soil, digests the organic matter, and excretes castings that contain 5 times more nitrogen, 7 times more phosphorus, and 11 times more potassium than the surrounding soil.

She processes a strip of soil 6 inches wide and 6 inches deep every night. In a year, the earthworm population under one acre of lawn moves 18 tons of soil upward through their bodies and deposits it on the surface as castings. They turn over the entire topsoil layer every 10-20 years.

Charles Darwin spent his last 40 years studying earthworms. His final book — published 6 months before his death — was "The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms." He measured their soil-moving ability by placing stones on the surface and recording how quickly worm castings buried them. His conclusion: worms are the most important animal on Earth. Not the most impressive. The most important.

The ground you're standing on was built by the animal you step on without noticing.

Five hearts. No eyes. Six hundred million years of quietly building the world from the bottom up.

03/17/2026

Tick season starts now.

And the first thing you need to know is what NOT to do.

Deer tick nymphs — the primary carriers of Lyme disease — are the size of a POPPY SEED.

You won't see them.
You won't feel the bite.
They're emerging in spring as temperatures rise above 35°F.

But before you blanket-spray your yard with pesticides, understand:

Broad-spectrum tick pesticides ALSO kill:
→ The insects that feed birds that eat ticks
→ The soil organisms that support the ecosystem
→ The predatory insects that eat tick larvae

Nature's tick defense team:
→ Opossums: meticulously groom themselves, removing and consuming ticks
→ Wild turkeys: scratch through leaf litter eating ticks by the hundreds
→ Guinea fowl: legendary tick destroyers
→ Fire ants: kill ticks in the soil
→ Certain fungi naturally parasitize ticks

We debunked the "5,000 ticks" number for opossums, but they ARE fastidious groomers who remove and kill ticks they encounter.

Areas with healthy predator populations (including coyotes, foxes, and owls that control rodent hosts) have LOWER rates of tick-borne disease.

More rodents = more ticks.
Fewer predators = more rodents.
You do the math.

PERSONAL PROTECTION THAT WORKS:
→ Permethrin-treated clothing (kills ticks on contact)
→ Daily full-body tick checks after outdoor time
→ Shower within 2 hours of coming inside
→ Check pets daily (they bring ticks in)
→ Keep grass short near play areas and paths
→ Create a 3-foot wood chip barrier between lawn and woods

The ecosystem IS the tick treatment.
Stop destroying it and wondering why ticks are worse.

01/14/2026

What a cool tail

Found this adorable baby snake ☺️☺️
NC