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Post by 12540dumont on Apr 15, 2012 21:47:38 GMT -5
It was a day of carnage Attachments:
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Post by 12540dumont on Apr 15, 2012 21:48:44 GMT -5
Mama Tutsui brings in # 2 (looks like a baby rat to me. The first one was definitely gopher. Attachments:
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Post by 12540dumont on Apr 15, 2012 21:57:36 GMT -5
And then M'ma Tutsui brought in #3, a wee gopher. God bless that cat. So, Steev, this one's for you, it's on the Bar B... I wish I could clone this cat and turn loose a dozen of them. She's an odd one. She brought every one of these in the house. What drama as I had to move the fridge, and every free standing hidey hole in the house. Nanook finally disgusted with the entire affair, but his paw down on this 3rd one and it died of fear? Nanook is of course 3x the size of M'ma Tutsui. Attachments:
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Post by steev on Apr 16, 2012 0:04:24 GMT -5
The rodentulous vermin are certainly active already; I've been putting out poison baits the past two weeks; they're definately being nibbled.
Going for some plastic bags to pick greens, I was fishing around in the bag-o-bags when woops! there was something cold and moist; tree-frogs are out and about; I don't know why they love a bag of plastic bags so much.
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bertiefox
gardener
There's always tomorrow!
Posts: 236
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Post by bertiefox on Apr 17, 2012 6:33:08 GMT -5
Tried to live and let live alongside the pretty field mice living in the polytunnel over winter. I thought it was fairly cute how they had left the shells of all the hazel nuts they'd stored for winter there.
Then I sowed the peas, and everywhere I planted one, there was a little hole. Then I planted the fava beans, and ditto. Of those that managed to avoid the mice and started germinating, they came back and nipped each seedling off at soil level.
No more Mr Nice Guy! I got a couple of traps from the store, and dispatched three over three nights. Now all the resown peas are coming through without problems.
Pity there isn't something that will just get them to go elsewhere as it smells disgusting to a mouse.
I guess the alternative is to use a humane trap and then transport the mice to one of our most argumentative neighbours!
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Post by johninfla on Apr 17, 2012 7:40:38 GMT -5
I'm replanting my green beans because of Bambi..... my neighbor puts out corn to feed them!!!! One night Bambi may feed me! The sad thing is that I had planted Canelini (sp?) beans because my wife saw them on a cooking show and now we won't have them this year. Bush Blue lake is what's at the feed store. Oh well, something is better than nothing!  |
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Post by 12540dumont on Apr 17, 2012 11:41:59 GMT -5
Fierce some warrioress, M'Ma Tutsui brought in 2 more. Ohh she's worth her weight in gold. The only good varmint is a dead one. She got the entire gopher family. First Mom came in and wasn't she big and fat. Now she's brought in 3 wee cubs. That's 3 that won't have more!
There is no live and let live. As I told the woman who tried to let loose gophers in my field...transporting wild animals (yes, varmints are wild animals) without a license is against the law. And I would prosecute to the fullest extent of that law as well as send her bad vibes for the rest of my natural days.
Yesterday, M'Ma Tutsui let a gopher loose in the bathroom. Son was in the tub at the time. I dispatched said gopher, after I got it out of his clothes wad on the floor.
I could only squish it a little, so I could hand it back to the cat, still squeaking some.
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Post by steev on Apr 17, 2012 21:46:36 GMT -5
Rodents! I'd sooner have Republicans. I wouldn't want to eat rodents, not even smoked.
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Post by johninfla on Apr 18, 2012 7:51:46 GMT -5
Our dog Chola catches flying squirrels!!!! I've never seen her do it but in the morning she has them as presents for us! I suspect she is really Underdog in disguise.
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Post by steev on Apr 18, 2012 21:28:48 GMT -5
Was she trained on frisbees?
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Post by 12540dumont on Apr 19, 2012 0:11:51 GMT -5
That's so funny about the squirrels. When M'Ma Tutsui wanted to move in with us, she took out a red squirrel and dragged across the creek to Leo. Leo thanked her profusely and told her to go ahead and eat it. They had about a 5 minute conversation about how great a squirrel it was and how good a cat she was. Darn squirrel was the same size as she was.
That was it. The next day she took up residence. Of course I had to catch her and lock her in the bathroom (one of the two rooms with doors in our house), so I could get her to the vet to be spayed.
Leo is thinking that if we keep adding varmint char to the BBQ, when we do our bone char/charcoal garden experiment...the varmints won't like us.
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Post by potter on Apr 19, 2012 4:54:21 GMT -5
Oh gosh..all of the sudden my little mouse problems seem to be next to nothing reading these posts..
Or the pigeons.. or other crop nibbling feathered things..or the vine weevils that love my strawberries..or my neighbor who secretly tried to kill a lilac bush on our joining boundary hedge..polluting with weedkiller spray my water storage tanks from which the water nearly killed all my chillies and peppers last summer..HUH..but try to prove anything..
Birds I can take..I just use netting if/when necessary, creepy crawlies are preventable or I use appropriate predator nematode..seedlings can be taken out of reach from mouse, but the next doors big dragon..that one is hard to 'kill'.
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Post by johninfla on Apr 19, 2012 6:33:50 GMT -5
Steev, no, no frisbees but she does have a strange aversion to Kryptonite....... |
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Post by oxbowfarm on Apr 19, 2012 6:48:37 GMT -5
Bad vermin in our area - white tail deer
- meadow vole
- cottontail rabbit
- Canada geese
- crows and redwing blackbirds are about a tie
I'm hoping to be able to put up a good deer fence in a few years, especially since the wild boar are starting to migrate into the area from PA as the population builds. We haven't seen them yet but they've started to get sighted next county over. None of these are as bad or as chronic as Holly's gophers, they sound like a total nightmare. Deer are by far our worst pests, orders of magnitude worse than the rest of the list which are merely nuisances. |
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Post by 12540dumont on Apr 19, 2012 15:50:10 GMT -5
OMG, don't wait get that fence up. Remember 1 night of pigs took out 1/4 of my crops!
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