Attic Salt for Oct. 4, 2009

• By ED CULLEN
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Oct 4, 2009

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Thanks to those of you who shared your fox stories and photographs, as well as the photo of “Pendarvis,” the name a reader’s wife gave the possum who became a regular dinner guest at their house on Aberdeen Avenue.

The possum dined on the cat’s food on the kitchen doorstep.

The fox photographs are a hoot. It is easy to understand why the animal of fable is made to be a sly fox.

My screensaver is now one of these photos that shows a red fox, so pleased with himself, guarding a squirrel carcass. According to readers,  foxes do their best to control the squirrel population.

Betsy Toups lives at the dead end of Glasgow Street, around the corner from Whitehaven.

One night, Betsy watched as one, then two, three, four baby foxes crept onto the steps from under the front porch.

“This occurred every night. They grew increasingly bold, romping and tumbling all over the porch and steps until Mama and Daddy came home from hunting and shooed them back into their den under the porch.”

The other afternoon, I was wrapping up an interview with Nancy Jo Craig for a story on the nonprofit she heads.

Capital Area Corporate Recycling Council refurbishes old computers for children in low-income families, as well as businesses and individuals on a limited basis.

Craig took me on a tour of CACRC’s warehouse in Catfish Town where once again I was reminded of the omnipresence of wild animals in the city. Downtown’s feral cats were using the old warehouse as a nightclub until Craig began trapping and having them neutered. Craig used to head the Nature Conservancy in Baton Rouge.

We stopped to talk outside the warehouse on an afternoon trying hard to fulfill the weathermen’s promise of lower humidity and cooler temperatures. Of course, the conversation turned to box turtles.

I said the box turtles in my yard seemed more active than usual. Craig, who made her yard a habitat for box turtles, said that might be because they’re getting ready to hibernate.

Driving away from downtown, where the mayor was at that moment making a pitch for something called Alive on the riverfront, it occurred to me that Baton Rouge already has a nature show that operates on earthworms, grubs, mushrooms and table scraps instead of tax money.