Northern Pass – The Saga Continues

Several headlines made the front pages of the local newspapers over the past few weeks. The first; Northern Pass plan suffers a setback, reported that State environmental officials said the application filed by Northern Pass with the state Site Evaluation Committee is incomplete because the developers can’t prove they have the necessary property rights for the project. The Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests challenged that Northern Pass lacks the property rights to apply for this permit

Interestingly The New England Power Generators Association, a trade group representing independent power plant generators in the region advanced essentially the same argument in a November 10th letter to the SEC. While one can assume the Association is concerned about potential competition, the Society is more concerned about protecting the natural beauty of New Hampshire and duly filed a lawsuit in the Coos County Superior Court seeking to block the path of the line through a conservation area the society owns in Clarksville, near the Canadian border. Both groups have evoked wails of protest from Northern Pass.

You would think after five or so years of being consistently opposed that the proponents of Northern Pass would finally start listening and give in to the demands to bury the proposed line. At most they have thrown locals a bone by offering to bury about seven and a half miles of the line (out of the 100+ miles it wants to cover). It is perfectly doable to completely bury the line and eliminate the eye-sore towers they actually want to erect. So what’s the source of the resistance by Eversource?

Burynorthernpass blog has been documenting the controversy over Northern Pass and it’s clear money is a major factor, namely shareholder money. At a public hearing in Franconia November 18th, when asked if they made more money going down Routes 116 and 112 rather than Interstate 93, the lack of response was very telling. They all but took the fifth. One has to shake their head in amazement at the poorly concealed contempt these people seem to have for locals.

Eversource has certainly shown itself to be a very poor team player with its customers. Demanding deposits from customers, some of whom are good payers as well as some of who have trouble making ends meet, without bothering to distinguish between the two, is the unmistakable hallmark of a huge bureaucratic corporation. And these people are telling us about the bright new energy future their brobdingnagian project would bring? Excuse us for being a bit skeptical.

While we are on the downslope of peak oil , it’s past time we started looking at another option we don’t hear mentioned much these days. I’m talking of course about conservation. When was the last time you as an individual or business looked at your electrical usage and asked how much electricity do you really and truly need to have? When I drive home from work late in the evening, the road I am on is across the river from a large number of businesses which have a vast array of brilliantly glowing lights, mostly from box stores like Lowes, Home Depot and Walmart as well as a number of car dealerships. How much electricity is this gobbling up? Do they really need to have so many lights on and so late in the evening? When I drive along side streets at night, I see many houses which look like they have every room in the place lit. Now of course Christmas is nearing and the obligatory outside decorative lights are popping up. While they do look very pretty, is it really necessary to have so many? I’ve seen some places lit up like Broadway.

What about the electrical appliances you use? Will it really break your arm to use a spoon to mix with rather than an electrical mixer? Try line drying your laundry instead of using the electric dryer. Use a rake instead of a leaf blower. How about those hair dryers? Strange as it may sound, your hair has the power to dry on its own. How about going to bed a little earlier and turning out the lights half an hour or an hour sooner? You’ll be surprised at how rested you feel the next morning. Last but not least, given that the majority of TV programs are mindless drek, how about turning off the television (and the power strip it’s attached to)? You really won’t be missing anything.

If everyone makes an effort to cut back on electrical usage, utility bills will be reduced and firms like Eversource will have far less leverage when trying to push Northern Pass down our throats.

Mousecapades

Now that the weather is chilling down, a common problem for people (myself included) is the fall invasion of mice seeking warm places to hang out for the winter. This year has seen a lot more activity due to the heavy fall of acorns and other mast goodies (as reported in one of my earlier posts) which has led to a population boom. Already I have caught six mice and can still hear activity inside the walls or up in the ceilings. As this is an old house, there are plenty of spaces for them to sneak into and it’s not easy to find them or get at them to seal them up to keep the little pests out.

The enormous fecundity of mice is an adaptation to the unhappy fact that they are number one on the menu for a surprising number of creatures: cats, foxes, coyotes, weasels, hawks, owls, skunks, snakes, crows, blue jays, even occasionally herons, and oddly enough, squirrels. The mouse has out of necessity adopted a secretive life-style and it is possible to have mice in your house and not realize it. Of course if the population is large, a fair amount of scuffling ensues when they are moving in and begin competing for living space. There are a variety of signs that mice are sharing living space with you and it’s a good idea to learn what they are, if you are determined to make your home as mouse free as possible.

What kind of mice can you expect to find? There are a variety of species, but here in New Hampshire, the mostly commonly found in houses are the house mouse, white footed mouse, and deer mouse .

All are cause for concern as they can carry a variety of diseases such as Hanta virus,  salmonellosis,  Lyme Disease and a variety of less common diseases. So far bubonic plague, which is in the western US, has not made its way to the east coast (knock on wood…). While the likelihood of contracting some of these illnesses is fairly low, the risk is always there and needs to be kept in mind when dealing with these pests.

Which naturally brings us to the matter of getting rid of them. The search for a better mousetrap seems unending. Best avoided are the poisoned baits for mice. While they may get rid of the mice, it’s the kind of gift that keeps on giving as any predator (including the neighborhood cat) are likely to ingest these toxins themselves if they happen to catch and eat these mice before the mouse has been killed by the poison. I did try using poison bait once a very long time ago, but found that the mice often rather than immediately eating the bait would take and store it in various places, such as my clothing drawers, which I definitely did not appreciate. Also there’s a good chance the little creatures will expire in an inconvenient place (which of course you will not be able to reach) and create an unpleasant reek.

Glue boards and traps catch the mice but do not kill them. That apparently is left up to you. If you don’t mind bludgeoning mice to death, be my guest but don’t expect me to invite you to any parties. If you are too chicken to kill them, the alternative to let them die of thirst and starvation and… yeah I thought so. I guess there is a way to get them off the strip without killing them but it’s a bit of an operation that’s stressful for both the mouse and you. So unless you enjoy being exposed to mouse excreta ejected by panicky mice (and the diseases that go along with them) glue strips are definitely out.

Some people like to use humane traps which catch the mouse but do not kill it. They then can be taken away and dropped in an area far from your house, leaving you feeling virtuous but the mouse utterly terrified as it is now in a strange place it does not recognize. Now then, if a giant idiot grabbed you and dumped you off in a strange place, what’s the first thing you would do? Well, yeah, you’d tried to get home! Which is likely what the mouse will do. If you haven’t taken it far enough away, the mouse will eventually make its way back to your place. If not, it will probably get snagged by a predator somewhere along the way. The odds that the mouse will just shrug its shoulders and contentedly take up residence where you place it are pretty low. Even if it were inclined to do so, in all probability a mouse already resides there, and as they are very territorial, it will quickly give the intruder the heave-ho.

This leaves the old fashioned snap trap. The wooden ones made by Victor are still available along with a wide variety of plastic snap traps and electronic traps which zap the rodents. I have tried a good number of them as I have arthritis and find it impossible to set the wooden ones. Success varies quite a bit with a number of traps failing to trigger when the mouse comes along and blithely eats the bait. The single electronic trap I tried, killed one and only one mouse and never again caught anything. The Victor quick kill trap seems to work as well as any of them, provided you position it so the mouse has to come directly at it and not from the side.

I’ve read the various reviews people have given of the different traps available and get the impression success depends as much on luck and the ability of the user to follow instructions, as it does the trap itself. Of course there is one mouse trap that rarely fails and has yet to be improved on. It’s the one that likes to sit in your lap and purr. The only drawback to this one is that it will occasionally present one of its catches to you, sometimes still in wriggling condition. Oh, well….

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