further encounters with urban wildlife

There are rats around and about. We managed not to see any until recently, perhaps thanks to the various mostly-feral cats that have been around--cats which Leela does not appreciate and has made some efforts toward chasing off.

Then Anna found a dead one a month or three ago, with no obvious cause of death (thankfully before hitting it with the lawnmower). It was starting to disintegrate, but since I have the normal American relationship with dead things, I have no idea how long it takes for the skin to start sliding around. Underneath that rat was a rat skull, picked clean. I would have thought that would take a while due to not having the proper beetles in the area, but there was inarguably a clean rat skull, and Dermestidae has hundreds of species, so who knows? Maybe it was the pillbugs. (This graphic--"How do you clean the brains out of a deer skull? Around here, we use compressed air!"--time-lapse video shows the beetles at work.)

The questions only beget more questions, though. How does a rat die next to our front walk, with no apparent trauma? Directly on top of a solitary rat skull? Did it run outside, see the skull, and die of fright? And really, what took them so long to show up? (The house came with what Anna referred to as "mouse highways," but then we saw no sign of any.)

One night, I just happened to spot a rat running along the top rail of our fence. We started to hear chewing in the bathroom wall, a couple spots in the ceiling. After many sweaty hours spent cleaning out our scary attic (Tyvek suits don't breathe), Anna found rat scat. Based on the flatter, more mouse-like shapes of the actual rats encountered, we have the black rat (Rattus rattus, among my favorite species names), rather than the brown/Norwegian rat (Rattus norvegicus, no slouch in the species-name department). The brown rat appears to carry a different load of diseases than the black rat, though when it's Ebola vs. Black Death, I don't think anyone really wins there.

It turns out there aren't a lot of options that don't involve killing rats. You can conceivably live-trap them, I guess? And drive them to the park to release, or something--it certainly doesn't scale well if you have many rats. Glue traps seems cruel, poison is cruel and offers the potential bonuses of dead rats in your walls instead of your attic, and of poisoned rats going about where other animals will eat them.

Anna set to work, and since we didn't know for certain what was eating the house, she put out 2 rat traps and 4 mouse traps, all of the old-school wooden variety that we know from Tom & Jerry cartoons. (The technology has improved quite a bit, and I wound up getting a couple of those, as well as a battery-powered electric one.)

There were lots of rat-noises, a striking amount of skittering around, some very loud squeaking; and some thumps and more skittering. One of the locations had set off a rat trap and both mouse traps, leading to one dead rat and one sure to be hurting, if not maimed. I'd always been warned those traps will break your finger, and while that may be true for a mouse trap, the much bigger rat trap will clearly break your finger bones into many unpleasant pieces. Not even rats can become that squished and survive.

Based on the spinal trauma, I have to imagine that the rat died quickly, but it still had time to try and bolt down the wall, and only the trap itself stopped her. (The solution to that is--wait for it--secure the trap in place.) One of the mouse traps was also at the top of the wall gap, so I'm guessing there was a colleague.

Left the 3 un-tripped traps in place; put the electronic trap up there, but turned off, so they'd get used to it. All bait remains untouched. Turned the electronic trap on; still untouched.

Was there only ever one rat? Did the other rats see and hear and smell their companion die, and think "This whole 'house' adventure was Diane's idea to start with. Fuck this, we'll take our chances with the cats"?

Mostly just glad it wasn't raccoons.

chirpcaphony

After 3 months, I just cracked open our second 40lb bag of sunflower seeds for the birds. Word seems to have gotten out about our backyard, and the past couple mornings have seen some ferocious bickering, posturing, and fluttering, as the birds jockey for feeding position. The winner seems to be whoever gets to be higher up while eating, so the two upper perches on the feeder are in demand.

That said, no one wants to be left out, so somehow there emerges the strategy of knocking sunflower seeds out of the feeder and onto the ground. It initially looks like sloppy eating, but of course birds are at least as accurate with their beaks as we are with fingers, and they are clearly capable of fetching a single seed at a time.

So the ground is covered in sunflower seeds, and the sunflower seeds are covered in birds. You can't see the ground from our kitchen window, so I was surprised to make a noise inside and startle close to a dozen birds hanging out and eating on the ground.

The squirrels also enjoy the sunflower seed overflow, and seem to have reached a détente with the birds. I have a plan to have the seeds fall into a cage that birds can get into but not squirrels, which presents a bit of an engineering challenge, but I think it can be done with judicious application of sharp, spiky wires. I've already got a smaller version keeping the squirrels off the beam directly above the feeder.

There's relatively few species that visit us; with our typical scientific rigor, they are:

• Red,
• Mrs. Red,
• Pointy Head,
• Stripey Head,
• Black Head,
• and the very occasional visiting Long Beak.

Smoke Alarm Bird (who most often sounds exactly like a smoke alarm's low-battery warning chirp) is omnipresent, of course, but a bit bigger than Red and Stripey or Black Head, and restricts herself to eating off the ground.

housing up a storm over here

We got a bird feeder and filled it with birdseed, which was thoroughly ignored until we replaced it with sunflower seeds. Now we have a bunch of tiny birds bickering over the feeder: there are 4 perches and usually 2 birds fighting, so it's a lot like me and my brothers when we were kids. There is one bird who ignores the bickering and just sits there and chows down; maybe that would have been my sister, if I'd had one.

This seems to be a genuinely squirrel-proof feeder, where the bird perches are mounted on a spring-loaded sleeve, and too much weight causes the sleeve to come down and close off the feeding holes. I had it hung on a string, which the squirrels didn't want to climb down; now it's on a swivel chain, and they don't like the rotation. We'll count that as a solid victory.

If you're going to buy sunflower seeds for birds, really the only sensible thing is to buy a 40-pound bag and have Amazon ship it to you. The downside is that now you have to put it somewhere, and the squirrels had no trouble figuring out that they were in a plastic bin on the patio. We put it in the garage, but our terrible garage has enough problems and I want squirrels to have no reasons to colonize it. Home Depot still carries metal trashcans, I think for the sole purpose of keeping animals out. The one model they carry is certainly a piece of shit compared to the ones we had when I was a kid, and I doubt it would stand up to being an actual trashcan. Said piece of shit is, however, proudly marked as American-made.

The rejected birdseed went into our compost bin. We have a compost bin! Along with "not having to move in the coming decade" and "I have a pool table," the compost bin must be my favorite thing about owning a house. (A close fourth is probably "paying for all the plumbing repairs myself.")

With the compost bin and the recycling--ignoring the non-trivial question of how much of that actually gets recycled--the waste produced by our household of 3 is about half of a paper shopping bag every week. And the level of the compost bin never seems to change much. Is it this magical if you grew up on a farm? I most surely didn't, and it's magical. Leaves, food waste, grass, eggshells, coffee grounds. Countless whole oranges from our tree, swiftly given completely over to mold in the compost heap, dissolved within weeks by the truly vast ecosystem it feeds. Mostly it's

• ants, who seem so content to have infinite food that they stay outside the house,
• fruit flies,
• tiny slugs (do they become bigger slugs? I never see bigger slugs),
• earthworms, a relatively recent phenomenon who for some reason are often crawling down the outside of the bin toward the ground,
• a specific kind of black beetle I've seen around here for years and years, here numbering in the hundreds, and
• a couple times I saw millipedes!

I haven't noticed the earthworms crawling down the outside recently; we've seen the occasional bird finding a snack on the compost bin, so nature may be selecting for earthworms that only want to dig down through the contents instead of going adventuring.

The single most amazing thing about the compost bin is that it never, ever smells like rotting food. It smells like the most delicious, flavorful dirt you can imagine. Anna extracts it occasionally--there is surprisingly little of it, see the constant-size comment above--and the plants are all big fans.

What kind of wonderful world do we live in where there's a way to make rotting food not smell like rotting food?