On our typical 3-mile walk along a gravel, country road near Eaton Rapids we probably pass by 15 culverts buried beneath driveways and beneath the road-bed. Those culverts allow the surface water from heavy rainfalls or snow-melt to follow natural flow-lines without washing out roadbeds or undermining driveways where they cross roadside ditches.
Those culverts are magnets for various small-to-medium sized animals.
Picture in your head the kind of disposable pot that landscaping plants are sold in. Visualize one that is of a size that will fit loosely (maybe 2" smaller diameter) in the culvert you have in mind.
Now visualize a cane fishing pole that you use to pass a double line from one end of the culvert to the other end. After you passed the line beneath the roadbed, you then pass half the length of the line through a hole drilled in the bottom of the pot and find some way to "fix" the middle of the line to that pot. Being a prudent and future-thinking kind of person, you take pains to tie both of the free-ends of the line to stakes on each side of the road*.
So you end up with one half of the line running the length of the culvert (and the far end secured to a stake or the base of a sapling). The middle of the line is fastened to the bottom of the pot on the other side of the roadbed. And the other half-length of the line is coiled up beneath the pot and its end is attached to a stake/sapling.
Then, as the fancy strikes you, you grab the free end of the line opposite the side of the road where the pot resides and you pull it through, much like you would pass a cleaning patch through a rifle barrel. What do you suppose any small animals sheltering in the culvert do when "pushed" by the pot?
If you were at the top of your game, you might have a bag over your end of the culvert, or maybe a wad of barbed wire to tangle up the critter as it comes blasting out of the end of the culvert. A critter caught up in a tangle of sharp barbed wire can easily be dispatched with a club and nobody farther away than 100 feet will be the wiser.
You collect the guest-of-honor for dinner and leave the pot where it is. The next time you visit you pull it in the opposite direction. One week you pull it left-to-right. The next week you pull it right-to-left.
If a fella had seven of these sets, he could "milk" a set once a week and if the sets were far enough apart he might score "meat" about 50% of the time. Not a bad pay-off for the investment.
*Ideally, the line would be a dingy, brown, earth-tone to not call attention to your "set".
Hmmm.....there are miles and miles of roadside drainage ditches "out in the country" where traffic is sparse. Seems like simply placing (and anchoring) a 10 foot length of culvert every mile or two into the ditch would produce similar results.
ReplyDeleteWere something like that to occur, I suppose the culvert diameter could be selected to deliver creatures of particular size, and culvert location chosen for probability of best results.
I like the way you think.
DeleteHigher elevation means it would take a more violent rainstorm to wash the critters out. Areas with better foraging would be more likely to harvest animals than areas with monoculture farm crops.
If you spend much time cruising around, you will see some areas are very popular for dumping trash. Those place are almost invariable far from prying eyes.
Having 'tried' to clean out a culvert once, I doubt that would work. We ended up using a truck with a winch to pull a plug through 6 feet of 12 inch culvert just to get all the crap out of it after a 2 hour battle to get the cable through it.
ReplyDeleteA chicken wire basket should work as a catch bag, that is till the bobcat hits it.
ReplyDeleteThere is a youtube channel, post 10, run by a guy that is trained in unclogging culverts, beaver dams, etc. Some of his vids are interesting. He has posted vids of him overnight camping in a culvert. Jim.
ReplyDelete