A lot of random encounters with nutria were taken to be giant rat sightings with low light and quick viewing conditions. But NOLA does have the distinction of being a gateway to many things from throughout the world that are not common to other ports or areas.
Steve
Gravity can be your helper.
And their politicians often say: "I deny the allegations and I damn the allegators!"
"Robert Green" wrote
Fairly sure Formosan termites did, don't know about fire ants.
Steve
Not when they've jammed themselves in so hard that you can shake the open trap vertically as hard as you can and the little SOB's are still stuck. BTDT. Both large racoons and possums have squeezed themselves in so hard their fur pops through the grid in a waffle pattern. I guess they are used to crawling into some pretty tight spaces with the probability that they'll always be able to back out.
The racoons, no matter how tightly they're jammed in there always exit as soon as they get the chance. Opossums on the other hand have had to hosed out and pressed out. As the other poster noted, they seem to want to make the trap their new home.
Even when any other creature would have left the trap under their own power, the opossums lingered until they were forced out. Brute force is not something I like to do with critters that size (~20 lbs) that emit green stinky goo when the fire ("the fire" is memory loss code for "they're afraid"). )-:
It's a pretty safe bet they're going to whiz on you or worse. Two year old tom squirrels with gonads as big as their heads can squirt some foamy noxious ooze that probably is great for attracting female squirrels but no so good for getting on your clothes. I'm sure the reason squirrels haven't been hunted to extinction is that they probably taste as bad as they smell. The dog likes the scent, though. She'll lick and sniff every wire of the empty crate when I bring it into the house.
-- Bobby G.
-snip-
Skunks are in no hurry to exit, either. I'm not sure if the Fischer or the cats have been the quickest to exit.
I just prop the door open and come back in an hour or two.
You've got to stop bring crap into your house that doesn't belong there. I shoot the damn squirrels right in the trap- rinse it off with a hose and catch another the next day. [woodchucks are a little more wary]
Jim
"Learning experience?" Sometimes it's something else.
I recall in the days of my youth being on a Boy Scout camping trip. A 'diller wandered into the camp site and several of us gave chase. The critter scooted into a tent and thence into a SLEEPING BAG containing one of our fellow scouts!
Our supine scount awoke due to significant clawing on his lower legs and, in a fit of adreniline-fueld strength, RIPPED the sleeping bag open! He was bleeding from multiple scratches and covered with green armadillo effluent.
There was nothing for it but to put the sleeping bag in the fire. As for the mentally shattered scout, after hosing him dow with ice-cold water, one of the advisors bundled him up and took him to the emergency room for a tetnus shot and a mental health examination.
The armadillo scurried off into the night.
While visiting a client in Rapid City, SD, they took me over to Mt Rushmore. On the way, we passed a roadside zoo. The client told an interesting story:
It seems the roadside zoo has a lion. About once a month the lion gets out of his pen and sits on the side of the highway watching the cars pass by. Freaked-out tourists jam the emergency service with calls and the local radio stations put out a "Lion Alert!"
Presently the lion's owner confronts the lion, telling him to get back inside, and the lion reluctantly sulks back to his pen.
The "Lion Alert" is canceled.
Out of the frying pan, into the fire. Having had a squirrel in the "relocation program" escape his carrier inside the van, I can sympathize with that scout. Being inside any sort of closed container, van or sleeping bag, with a terrorized critter doesn't often lead to a happy ending. Before perfecting the cattle prod technique for interdimensional transport, one squirrel that I didn't realize was soaked with car starter spray ether I used to keep him sedated, ignited into a huge ball of fire when given the coup de grace with the prod. After that I modified the prod so that the probes fit through the trap wire mesh and ether wasn't required.
My New Englander wife told me that soaking a cage full of rats in gasoline and setting them on fire was a popular technique with Boston industrial arsonists. They would use live traps to acquire a dozen or so and then soak their fur with gasoline. Within seconds of being released (on fire) the rats would scurry to the far corners of any building they were released in, creating multiple points of ignition and leaving very little obvious evidence for arson investigators.
Armadillos shoot green goo, too? Boo! Just more to be thankful for - we don't have skunks OR armadillos around here. Hope it stays that way although my wife tells me that we've been upgraded (downgraded?) to a different and warmer climate zone for growing in the last ten years by the Department of Agriculture. Our heating bill is less than half what it was last year. Hopefully this summer the cooling bill won't be twice what it was last year. Hopefully the warmer weather won't mean that creatures that plague mostly the warmer southern states won't be moving north. The very warm winter we've had has already had critter consequences. Stink bugs are all over the place which is very unusual for February.
Saw another good exterminator trick tonight: the exterminator used rotting food he food in a dumpster in the rat-plagued area as bait claiming that they are much more likely to go after "familiar" food that his normal peanut butter bait. In this case it was old beef jerky. Every trap had a dead rat in it. He claimed the job was done, but I wouldn't make that assumption if every trap was filled. I'd guess that there were still more "customers" who weren't able to find an empty trap. I'd consider the problem solved when most baited traps came up empty, not after the first round of baited traps came up 100% full. At least these rats (in downtown Chicago) didn't have giant cockroaches stealing the bait before the rats could get to it.
After collecting all the full traps with his bare hands, all the while talking about the diseases they carried, he cordially shook the hand of his female client. Ewww! Also him go after the worst bat infestation in an attic I have ever seen. The guano in the attic was several inches deep and the bat piss was leaking through the ceiling of the living room. There were
100's of them in the attack in a number of different "colonies" at the peak of the roof and all along the eaves. They relocated them in a rather arduous process. I would have gone for the shop vac . . . Beneficial or not, I don't live in their homes. I expect reciprocation!-- Bobby G.
You would have to mention that goddamn program......
Just this past weekend I went to the local bar and grill and was enjoying a good dinner, when I looked at the tv on the wall and see that "Billy the Exterminator" guy grabbing a rat by the tail from on top of a light fixture. I almost puked right there on the table. Just then the waitress came over and asks me if everything is ok. I said "NO". She asked what was wrong, when I told her that the food was good, but if she did not change the tv program, that I was gonna vomit all over the place and would never come back. She asked what I'd like to see on the tv, I said "*anything* except disgusting rats".
She immediately changed the channel to some basketball game, and came back and asked me if that was ok. I thanked her and handed her a tip. I told her "Rats are just some of he most disgusting things on earth, and I sure the hell dont want to have to see them when I'm eating dinner"! She agreed with me and said that the tv is always on and most of the time no one pays attention to the programs. I grinned and said "just leave it on a sports channel and you'll be pretty safe". She laughed.
Oh, I can think of some other things I've seen around dinner time more offensive than rats. There's some animal planet show where they cut open huge pythons, lions and other animals. Mike Rowe crawling through the San Francisco sewers on "Dirty Jobs" was about the worst I can recall. Rats, roaches that got down the back of his shirt, unknown things slithering in the waste water, piles of turds (some orange in color leading the sewer worker to exclaim "steady diet of Cheetos"), etc. When I see something like that, I thank God that people were created with all sorts of talents. If I had to maintain city sewers, they wouldn't be maintained.
My journalism prof was fired from a job as managing editor on a newspaper because he ran a picture on page 1 of the morning edition of a fireman yanking a giant python out of a toilet. The publisher thought it was in very poor taste for a morning daily newspaper, as did about a thousand readers.
I was watching some History Channel special on WWII in the Pacific and they were showing full color movies of rotting Japanese corpses in various states of decay and destruction. It was breakfast time, too.
Billy's carelessness and lack of proper precautions remind me of Steve Irwin, the Croc Hunter. You always knew it was going to end badly for Irwin. I get the same feeling with Billy. My MD told me that if even if you aren't allergic to bees to begin with, you can become so severely allergic after a serious attack (Billy's had a few already) that you can die if you get stung by a lot of bees and don't have an epi pen handy.
-- Bobby G.
On 2/28/2012 12:30 AM, Robert Green wrote: ...
and here's what happens if you try to shoot racoons in your hav-a-hart
Wasn't his day. I'd like to know what kind of trap he's using that will reverse a 22 bullet at point blank. I'll bet there was something hard *behind* that trap.
I've never had a ricochet with my pellet gun, but then there isn't a lot of power left once it goes through a skull.
Jim
Well darn, I thought pro basketball players are just some of the most disgusting things on earth. ^_^
Democrats.
You messed up the link, you misspelled whitehouse, you left off the "e" on the end. ^_^
TDD
Good point. Democrats would never have figured that out.
Oh come on, Democrats aren't stupid. Evil, demented, vile, bizarre and megalomaniacal but not stupid. I love my Democrat friends and cousins, they're almost as entertaining as little children. ^_^
TDD
Must have been a male lion. FWIW, they are mostly only a danger to lion cubs sired by another male or a nomadic male trying to horn in on their pride. Otherwise, it's the females that do that hunting and killing, but the males that get fed first and then mostly sleep, screw and roar. You have to pay the males a surcharge to kill tourists. It's just not in their job description and the Lion's Union pays close attention to excursions.
-- Bobby G.
Evil and stupid aren't exclusive. You seem to even think they're human.
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