Showing posts with label Plagues. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Plagues. Show all posts

Friday, June 21, 2013

Plagues?

I'm beginning to get a bit suspicious at the series of "troublesome critters" this year.  First there was the groundhog.  I seem to get a couple each year for the past few years.  I usually live-trap and relocate them miles away, but that is tiresome (and possibly illegal), and replacements always arrive for a while.  This year I decided to just start dumping the bags of catbox scoopings into the burrow entrances.  This groundhog dug 2 more new burrow entrances that I kept filling up before it gave up and moved away.  At least, I can't FIND any new entrances and I haven't seen it out on the back lawn at dusk.

But perhaps it made a deal with the squirrels.  As soon as IT vanished, the squirrels started pulling up my new bean, cuke, and corn seedlings.  I've tried to live-trap THEM, but no luck yet.  I attached the live-trap to the top of the fence they use as their personal highway, but I think they just run over top of it.  I may have to encourage them to go THROUGH the live-trap with a small chicken wire wall above it.

Meanwhile, I was invaded by small ants.  As mentioned in a previous post, they don't seem to be coming FROM anywhere or going TO anywhere in particular, just wandering around near the deck door and the kitchen backsplash.  No trail of ants going back and forth, no food being targeted.  They don't even bother the cat's food!

I think that the invasion is over, because I didn't see one for 2 days and then just one this morning.

But perhaps they all turned into houseflies!  Yesterday morning, I woke up to find a dozen of them all buzzing at the living room window looking for a way out.  The source baffles me.  I haven't had any windows open, there are none in the garage where I keep the garbage, there are none in the small compost collection bin, there are none in the basement where some mouse might have gotten in and gotten killed by the cats.

They are easy enough to kill against the windows, but I found just as many there again TODAY!  Killed those too of course.

What's next, a rain of frogs?

Looking Up

 While I was outside with The Mews, I laid back and looked up.  I thought the tree branches and the clouds were kind of nice. Nothing import...