Posts Tagged ‘wasps’
Just Dropped
Turns out, Swings’ mask didn’t vanish after all. She just dropped it where I failed to notice, despite walking surprisingly close to that very spot during my search. Cyndie found it yesterday morning.
I will admit to looking for the wrong color mask. Thought it was one of the black ones, although the fact it was light-colored should have made it easier to see.
As we were walking back from rolling our trash and recycling bins to the road yesterday, we came upon Swings’ mask lying in the hay field. Second day in a row she has wrestled her way out of it. I guess she doesn’t want to have it on her head when the weather is so hot and humid. Meanwhile, Mia followed Cyndie around with a cloud of flies on her face while Cyndie was looking for the first lost mask yesterday morning. Mia was lobbying to have her mask on as soon as possible.
While the horses are dealing with flies, our battle has become hordes of increasingly vicious mosquitos. Yesterday they were buzzing my head and as I tried to swat them away, two of them flew behind my sunglasses. Since when do mosquitos fly between eyelids and glass lenses? Makes it really hard to swat them.
Mowing on the zero-turn was a challenge because when I let go of a lever to swat a biting mosquito the tractor immediately turned.
Time for us to start wearing our own “fly masks” of the mosquito netting variety.
I needed more than mosquito netting to fend off wasps that were showing up around the door to the shop. The solution was more of the poisonous chemical variety when I finally located the nest being built in the outdoor light over the door.
That’s where I installed an on/off switch earlier in the year but I haven’t reached up there to turn it on all summer because it never gets dark until late. When I looked up at it, finding the wasp nest was difficult through the scary-looking multi-level webs of some very industrious spider(s).
I forgot to wait until all the wasps had returned at the end of the day so the afternoon got a little dicey as the disgruntled survivors dealt with the disaster discovered upon their return. Oops.
My bad.
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Digging Out
I’m not confident this is the final chapter of our woodchuck pest, but yesterday I dug out the window well to reclaim our egress space for the basement bedroom. You may recall I posted this image of the early evidence of a burrowing invader making a mess outside the window.
We did eventually enlist the services of a professional with wild animal extraction expertise, but the results weren’t exactly what we had in mind.
Initially, he set a trap across the opening of the hole. When that didn’t do the trick and the displaced sand filled over half the height of the window, he came back and added a second baited trap.
Days passed with little evidence of activity, but one trap tripped. The trail camera he added captured one image of the critter going under the little opening beneath the plastic cover over the window well, so he suggested we block that with a piece of wood.
The plan was to reset the trap one last time with the opening blocked. If there was no activity, we could assume the pest was on the outside and would no longer have access.
While he was setting things up for that last time, Cyndie warned him to be careful of the wasps showing up nearby. He spotted the ground nest a few feet away and offered to take care of it, at a discount, since he was already on site.
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Ultimately, those ended up being the only pests he visibly dispatched.
Yesterday, we noticed he had removed his traps, as planned since there was no additional activity. That was my cue to dig out the well and replace the cover.
I sure wish I could put all that sand back where it came from, but hardly any of it fit back into the hole in the corner. The rest had to be hauled away for use filling various washout voids around the yard.
In the absence of an actual capture, I will not be surprised if new burrowing shows up someplace else around the house.
It’s becoming pretty much the norm around here.
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Relative Something 