Stupid hawk, stay out of my house

[classicdrogn]

I aprreciate one less squirrel on the fedder, but how did you even fit through the window with that wingspan? Get away from my pizza! Out out!

[classicdrogn]

... pay no attention to the sleepwalking idiot who can somehow manage to type. It's not me, it's a time traveling alien shapechanger robot or something. Yes, definitely.

(Seriously, I have no idea how I managed to post something without waking up enough to remember it, even having fallen asleep in front of the computer because the chair is comfortable and I'm still too sore from a fall yesterday night to lie down and get up easily. No idea what I was on about either, it had to have been a dream just from the time but... yeah.)

[robkelk]

No idea what I was on about either, it had to have been a dream just from the time but... yeah.)

That, or you had an idea for a story and this is where you wrote it down.

[Bob Schroeck]

And here I thought we had a thread where I could complain about the raccoons in our attic...

[classicdrogn]

Eh, go ahead. I apparently thought I had a pizza-thieving hawk invasion, whi9ch is close enough.

[robkelk]

And here I thought we had a thread where I could complain about the raccoons in our attic...

Bob, it's your forum. Literally. If you want to complain about the raccoons in your attic, we can't stop you.

[Labster]

I've had a scrub jay come in the house to ask for more peanuts, please.  It's fine, he's very polite and talks to us.  Hides half of the peanuts in the yard for the dog to discover, which she really appreciates.

But then the towhee watched the jay come inside, and came inside himself to ask for more rice.  Smart bird, but not smart enough to remember to come back in the way he came, and not towards the windows.  Took him a couple minutes to figure out how to get back outside.

[Norgarth]

More along the lines of Bob's issue, I've had squirrels in my walls. managed to get a block of rat poison up near the hole they chewed in the outside wall a few days ago and the noise has died down (pun intended) need to rig up something to seal the hole before more move in. Current plan is expanding foam in the hole and then attaching steel mesh over it.

[Inquisitive Raven]

I've had a scrub jay come in the house to ask for more peanuts, please.  It's fine, he's very polite and talks to us.  Hides half of the peanuts in the yard for the dog to discover, which she really appreciates.

But then the towhee watched the jay come inside, and came inside himself to ask for more rice.  Smart bird, but not smart enough to remember to come back in the way he came, and not towards the windows.  Took him a couple minutes to figure out how to get back outside.

I recently had new windows installed. I'm hoping this will solve the problem of random unidentified birds getting into the house. One of the windows I replaced had an upper sash that would not stay up and birds would get in through the opening, since the screen only really kept things from getting in through the lower sash.

[Labster]

My birds weren't unidentified, I had a relationship with both of those birds. The jay would take nuts out of my hand, and the towhee hung around the dog's bowl to get any leftover rice (for a while after the melamine scare, we just started cooking for the dogs), earning him the name "rice bird".

[Bob Schroeck]

I guess I might as well give the raccoon update...

Starting more than a month ago we've been hearing animals in the attic.

Three weeks ago, they had a fight, loud and violent enough to panic my wife and send the dining room chandelier swinging.

Two weeks ago it became obvious that one had died as a result of the fight, and we had its carcass removed. It was confirmed to have been raccoons, and the fight was probably a territorial one between a male and a female, with the female coming out the loser.

Later in the evening of the same day, we heard the animal(s) again. We haven't heard it since, but we hired the same company that cleared out the carcass to set traps and screen off known and possible entry points (we have an early-1960s vintage home, and its soffit vents are simply 2-inch by 10-inch slots with metal mesh -- unfortunately, over the last sixty years the mesh has fallen out or been pushed out of nearly all of them). On Monday they put new heavy steel mesh ("hardware cloth" in their parlance) over all the soffit vents except the one identified as the raccoons' entry point. That one got a trap hung directly under it, in case there was a raccoon still in the attic. Another trap is on the ground directly underneath it. Neither has caught anything all week, so we're pretty confident the attic is clear, at least. I've been told that the winner of the fight probably has several dens in the area that he rotates through, and he just hasn't come back to us yet; the company we hired will basically keep maintaining and baiting the traps until they catch him. And when they take down the trap under the eaves they'll put mesh over that last hole.

Unfortunately that's not the end of the story -- once that's all done we're going to have to have the old insulation pulled out of the attic, any droppings up there cleared out, the entire thing disinfected, and new insulation laid down. The one bid we've gotten so far for that job was over US$8000 -- not exactly in our budget right now, but we're going to have to get that done before winter. At least we don't use the attic for storage -- the trusses up there are all filled with diagonals that make it impossible to actually put anything of any size up there. Not to mention our only access is a small hatch in our front hall closet.