Local critters made news in 2014

Editor’s note: This is one in a series of columns looking back at regional news in 2014. It will continue through Jan. 1.

For three nights in a row, alarms went off at the Clovis-Carver Public Library.

The first night, on Jan. 24, police arrived at 3 a.m. and spent 90 minutes searching for a prowler or a disturbed bookworm or who knew what.

“We thought maybe a homeless person might have hid out in the building,” said Margaret Hinchee, the library’s director.

Indeed there was more evidence that some one, or some thing, was visiting the library after hours. The dirt was disturbed in the potted plants, for example, and there was evidence it was being used as a bathroom.

Finally, a custodian reported seeing a cat in the library. And then security video confirmed the intruder.

And so library staff set a trap with salmon inside and closed up as usual the night of Jan. 28. Five minutes later, the black and gray feral cat with white paws was trapped in a cage.

The cat mystery topped the list of critter stories in 2014.

But it wasn’t the only time critters made the news.

• Prairie dogs made headlines again in 2014, but kept a lower profile than a year earlier when the city formally declared them a “public nuisance.”

An anonymous p’dog lover in January paid a Santa Fe company $3,000 to relocate about 100 of the animals from Clovis to an undisclosed location in southern New Mexico. Eco Solutions of Santa Fe flushed the animals from their holes with a mixture of soap and water.

“There’s a demand for both getting prairie dogs out of places that are no longer their natural habitats, and a demand for people who are looking for prairie dogs to restore grassland ecosystems, and other stuff too. This is an effective, humane way to get it done,” said Trent Botkin, owner of Eco Solutions.

• But some things never change. Everybody still wants our mosquitoes dead.

Above-average rainfall during the summer kept area vector control officials busy, spraying chemicals in the wee hours of morning — when wind is typically less and they’re most effective because of temperatures — across more than 1,000 square miles in Curry County alone. Officials said they targeted more than 300 locations for spraying.

The city of Clovis averaged 10 to 15 mosquito complaints a day in early June.

There were no known organized efforts to save the mosquitoes.

David Stevens is editor for Clovis Media Inc. He can be contacted at 1-800-819-9925. His e-mail address is:

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