Mouse (and other Pest) Wars

["couldbecousin"]

  This thread has just reminded me of my first apartment, where I lived alone part of the year
  because my roommates were college students who went home during school vacations.  During
  one of those vacations, I started to hear a crackling sound in the living room wall, like
  Rice Krispies.  Never occurred to me to report it to the landlord.  This was my first time living
  on my own, and I just passively shrugged off the noise as something that was happening for
  whatever reason.  The landlord must have let himself in at some point and heard it for himself.
  Turns out there were bees in the wall, maybe carpenter bees?
  Imagine if they'd chewed through and swarmed into the living room. 
  Landlord was not happy with me. 

[WolFish]

I've got my share of stories - bats coming out of light fixtures climbing up living room curtains, mice falling on my bed and opening a packet of crackers and eating it, and worst of all waking up in my first ever apartment on my own to find a giant roach munching on my ear wax.

squirrels are cute so long as they don't get in the house. then they are the worst pests. they chew through everything and pee all over the place. i wasn't able to get rid of them until they put on a new roof. the squirrels didn't like it. they left and never came back.

the current mouse issue is weird. they haven't bothered anything i have left out downstairs. py doesn't eat in her room while i have lots of food in mine. haven't seen any mouseness (droppings, shredded nesting material, chewed things, etc.) outside of the chewed straws. lots of noise and no sightings, just feelings. makes me wonder if it isn't really a ghost mouse.

["couldbecousin"]

  I keep hearing things myself.  I think they're legitimate sounds of other things.
   I really hope so.  I need to clean up again.  I don't want to keep on hearing ghost mice. 

[DirtDawg]

WolFish had a bat in his living room once.

I think my favourite was the time down south when I was in the kitchen and felt something moving in my pants. It was a fricking lizard. A brown anole. I like the little guys, but not THAT much. 

Never had personal contact with a lizard, as far as I know, other than a ten pound iguana an ancient girlfriend had.  It roamed the house when she was home, but went to its terrarium at dusk.

A cat we once had used to hunt all night and he had free reign of the neighborhood where we lived.  He would often bring us "gifts."  One night my wife and I were both asleep when he comes in through his door and runs into the bedroom with a kind of panic in his voice with something in his mouth, obviously. He plopped a live bat down on the bed between us and gave out this confused sounding whine. Seemed like he said, "WTF  is THIS!??!"

At that time we had two fifty gallon aquariums in our bedroom and they made really interesting nightlights. We could see this bat with about a two foot wingspan take off from our bed and disappear into the next room, where it was darker.  The game was afoot!

First thing I did was to grab one of my high intensity copy lights, four thousand watts of 5500K brilliance (in that house I had a darkroom AND a copy room) so I could keep up with the "guest." I caught it with a large towel and got it safely outside after a few minutes of blinding it with powerful light.

That was a kind of harrowing Bat Night.

["couldbecousin"]

  ^ I had not thought of bats having a two-foot wingspan.   


      Yikes. 

[DirtDawg]

  ^ I had not thought of bats having a two-foot wingspan.   


      Yikes. 

I could not tell what kind of bat it was but we do have some big insectivore bats in Indiana.. This one had a body larger than one of my fists and I do not have small hands. Once I had finally caught it up and gathered it into a huge towel (me wearing my leather gardening gloves, too!! I did NOT want to be bitten.) I had it held out away from my face and one of its wings that was loose could easily rake across my biceps as it struggled to free itself. From my hands to my biceps is at least one foot any way it can be measured.

Generally the bats around here are fruit eating bats who also eat insects. They have wingspans in the fourteen to eighteen inch range for the large ones. The one my cat managed to catch and bring home alive was probably old and slow and flying low - just a guess.

We had a "baby bat"  hanging on one of our overhangs at work for a while, a few years back. It was only about seven feet or so up hanging onto the side of the slanted overhang. This is where I used to go to smoke and I noticed it right away, but was not sure what it was until it moved. I thought it was a fungus of some sort, then it moved.

It had a body about the size of my thumb and I doubt that its wingspan was a foot wide. I had been injured some how and it had been bleeding along its back. It sat there for three days before it disappeared. DO not know if it got better and flew off or if some other predator got to it. We have night hunting kestrels  -tiny, starling sized- barn owls, smallish but larger than kestrel - in the area.  As well as those two raptor types, we also have many, many red tail hawks -  huge fuckers!  Stand almost knee high. Talk about a wingspan, wow! Three to four feet, easy and they hunt in broad daylight as well.

Do not know what happened to that baby bat, but it allowed me to stand within a couple of feet of it, before I could tell that what I was seeing was not a fuzzy spore covering, but real fur, then it moved.