Nebraska man goes golfing. Then he realizes there’s something trapped in the pool skimmer—and asks his wife to look: ‘I did not expect that’
Michele Strom (@themichelestrom) didn’t sign up for wildlife retrieval. The former University of Denver gymnast and one-time Mrs. Nebraska says her husband rang mid-round from the golf course with a simple ask: Go check the pool skimmer. Something was in it.
What awaited her was a baby mammal, and the discovery hit harder than she expected.
“Seriously? Me,” she said. “Why do I gotta look? I don’t wanna look.”
She documented her all-too-common homeowner problem in a recent TikTok video.
‘It’s definitely a blue job’
Strom’s husband suspected something was lodged in the skimmer and needed eyes on it. She balked immediately.
“It could be a snake or a spider,” she protested, citing the couple’s running household shorthand—”blue jobs” and “pink jobs,” their tongue-in-cheek division of labor by gender. A skimmer inspection fell squarely in the blue column.
“I’m gonna leave it there,” she said.
She didn’t leave it there.
In a follow-up video, Strom approaches the skimmer with visible reluctance. What she finds is a baby bunny, motionless in the basket — its small form initially resembling the top of someone’s head through the murky water.
“The skimmer mystery has been solved, and I can say it is not what I expected,” she says. “And I’m kinda sad about it. I’m not gonna lie.”
Her husband, watching remotely, cycles through his own surprise. “Oh, that is not what I thought it was going to be. Maybe it’s a skunk. Does it smell great?” Told it’s a bunny, he concedes without hesitation: “Blue job. It’s definitely a blue job, babe.”
Wait, how did he know there was an animal in the pool skimmer if he was out golfing?
Her husband likely used an app on his phone. Services like PoolScout, CamerEye, MaiGuard, and Pool Angel monitor home swimming pools and send alerts if they detect a stuck animal.
“Is that a crowning baby?!” joked one person in the first video. Another person said, “I am very concerned and creeped out.”
In the second video, some had a bad feeling. “That’s exactly what I thought it would be,” said one commenter. A couple of people recommended a “critter ramp” that would help animals out of the water, or getting netting put around the pool.
“Why did [her husband] wait till he was golfing for him to remember the skimmer?” another person asked. Strom replied, “He saw the dogs going crazy around the skimmer on the cameras.”
A common backyard heartbreak
Baby rabbits, frogs, mice, and other small wildlife are regularly drawn to backyard pools but don’t know how to escape. With close to 10 million pools across the country, wildlife biologist Rich Mason estimates the annual death toll reaches well into the millions. Mason, who invented a floating escape ramp after a friend’s pool killed dozens of frogs in a single summer, keeps the calculus simple: “If you give animals a way out, most of them will find it.”
The Big Lead reached out to Strom via TikTok message/comment and to Nebraska Game & Parks via email.
