Mickey & Minnie

This past week I learned that I have a mouse problem in the house. Last Wednesday night, our daughter came in from Little Rock to leave for the wedding in College Station the next day. After she moved out, I transformed her upstairs bedroom into my sewing room, and I still had some pre-wedding sewing going on when she got there. She decided to sleep downstairs in her brother's old room. She was upstairs in our room sometime after 1:00 am that night telling me there was a terrible noise downstairs. Once I was awake enough to respond, I called the cat's name. She was nearby; not downstairs making noise. I scooped up the cat and went downstairs. I heard a noise in the wall between the back staircase and the hall to the downstairs bedrooms right away and knew it was mice. The cat perked up because she heard it, too. I put her down and she walked up and down the hall sniffing the wall, but couldn't do any more than that. I couldn't do anything about it because we were leaving the next morning. Now, I assumed this was a new event, with the temperatures about to change. We don't get evidence of mice every year in the fall, but it has happened often enough over the years to be half way expected. It is a big, country house on piers that turned 80 years old this year. Sometime over the four days we were in Texas for the wedding, our son and his new bride heard the story and chimed in with their own versions of hearing the mice while staying downstairs. I was appalled that it had been going on for that long and nobody had mentioned it. Can't fix it if we don't know about it.

Today I bought a supply of mouse bait. This evening, I emptied out the floor of the food pantry that has an access panel to the area beneath the stairway. The cat and I had heard the mice last night. I pried the panel off and saw where the little beggars had removed some of the sealant I had plugged holes years before with and had gotten in. I was expecting to see a whole mouse circus set up under the stairs when I opened the panel. I was relieved not to see much of anything. I had cleaned behind it years before and it still looked pretty good. I called the cat to come check it out. She walked all around the area for 15 minutes or so, sniffing and investigating. When she was done, I tossed in some bait and closed the panel. I will re-seal it tomorrow. I left everything out of the pantry so the cat can patrol it during the night. I will toss some bait up in the attic and between the floors tomorrow and hope that will work as well as it has in the past.

On the outside, I was glad to see the hummingbirds are still here. Below are some pictures I took last week. They are all over the red turk's cap flowers. Gulf fritillary butterflies also enjoy the turk's cap.

Road Trip

Today my daughter and I drove from Collinston to College Station, Texas. It was a very long drive--387 miles in 7 hours, including a brief lunch stop, a gas stop, and an after lunch pit stop. The problem is you just can't get here from there. A further problem for me was that we had a very long stretch from Henderson to Buffalo and there were no interesting grasses, no wildflowers, and the only birds I saw were crows and vultures.

Somewhere along the way, I noticed that we must have crossed a "frost" line because the trees were full of ball moss. That is a close relative of our Spanish moss that grows in tight balls in warmer regions on nearly any aerial surface. I have seen it completely covering utility lines in southern Texas. It grows in the Baton Rouge area in Louisiana and places south of there.

We drove a short ways on I-45, from Buffalo to Madisonville. Texas Highway 21 from Madisonville to Bryan had beautiful roadside displays of grasses and fall wildflowers and almost no traffic. That's my kind of traveling!

It rained on us several times, and is raining here this evening in College Station. We were very surprised at how cool it was when we got out of the car at the hotel. It was in the mid-60's, and was down to 60 degrees when we got in from supper.

Our hotel is full of police and firemen from New York City. They have been here all week at some sort of training seminar. Strange hearing those New York accents in the elevator. A big group of them came in the front door as we were checking in. I couldn't hear their accents, but they all had a look about them. I asked the clerk if they were having a Bubba convention, and he told me who they were, and that they were leaving tomorrow. I guess they will be replaced by Aggie fans, as this hotel and all others in town are full for the weekend because it is a home game Saturday.

Tomorrow I will go visit the florist and do some last minute gathering up for the rehearsal dinner Saturday night.

Flowers and 'shrooms

I cautiously ventured outside yesterday, hoping the rains had stopped. I took along the fire ant poison, since the little devils were busy building up their mounds trying to dry them out. There were so many mushrooms popping up everywhere that I went back and grabbed the camera. Along the way I found a flower or two in bloom, and then got absorbed in watching the butterflies and hummingbirds on the turk's cap flowers.
This one, called Green Parasol, is newly popped out of the ground, and makes quite a show. They always come up in the same spots when it rains a lot and are highly poisonous. After a day or so, it grows in to a large flat-topped mushroom. The white skin pops open and begins to flake off.























I discovered these lavender colored ones today in the lawn. As best I can tell, they are Amethyst Laccaria. One book says, "edible, but poor" and the other says "harmless, but not worth eating." Don't worry, I won't.








Elsewhere out in the lawn I found Lady's Tresses orchid. They seem to appear overnight scattered in the lawngrass. Sometimes the spike will be 18" or more. This one was barely a foot tall. They are true orchids, as you can tell from the tiny flowers. The flowers are arranged in a spiral formation, which is noted in the botanical name, Spiranthes. It is a terrestrial orchid, meaning it grows in soil, as opposed to the common florist type orchids that have aerial roots and grow in trees.






Scattered all over Kalorama is this bulb which blooms every year in early fall, Zephyr Lily. I was taught that they were not native, but everything I have researched on them so far is stating that they are. My "last word" in botany is the USDA Plant Database web site. It has been so slow for the past month, that I have hardly been able to use it. All that aside, it is a lovely little flower and prolific, showy bloomer.

More pests

I am happy to report that after setting the afore mentioned trap, we had an armadillo in it the next morning. I believe that may be the sixth one I have caught. I have a situation tailor-made for catching them. They like to root along the base of the front porch. It stays damp there from the run-off from watering the container plants on the porch. I place the trap parallel to the porch right up against the base and the armadillo, blind as a bat, just wanders in and trips the door. When I see the signs and put the trap out, I usually catch it the first night. If I don't, and there are new signs of digging in the morning, then I turn the trap around because I know he is coming from the other direction. I thought I might get a picture of the latest catch, because it was a big one. I set the trap on end and opened the door to look at it, and the smell was so foul that I shut it up and refused to open it again for a picture.

After the rain we got earlier in the week, I decided to work on reducing the fire ant population. They respond to heavy rain by building up their mounds in the days after the rain, which makes them easier to spot. I have a wedding coming up in a couple of weeks, and I have been trying to be very careful to avoid any sort of bruises, scraps, or other assorted wounds that I seem to collect on the job, especially on my feet and ankles. Most years I manage to get by with only one or two ant bites, but these past two weeks I have collected more on my feet than in my entire life!

I found that if I patrol for the mounds in spring and fall, I can pretty much keep them subdued. I have learned the high and dry places they like best on the property and I aggressively seek them out and destroy the mounds. I felt like that would be a safe, injury-free task for me to do. While out pestering the ants, I noticed quite a bit of damage being done in an area by an armadillo along the edge of a bed out on the grounds. He had been working in a straight line where the pine straw met the grass. I thought I could put the trap out in the line and I just might catch him. I have never had success away from the porch getting an armadillo in the trap. The trap had been sitting near the back door on a couple of flagstones. I didn't want to put it up until I was sure there was no fresh damage in the front flower bed. I picked it up and set it on the back of the BadBoy, and immediately felt something stinging my feet. Much to my dismay, I discovered that in the short time the trap had been sitting there, a huge fire ant mound had been constructed under it and around the flagstones it was sitting on. Now there were fire ants everywhere--all over the ground, the trap, the BadBoy, and the water hoses that were also on the vehicle. I dusted it all with fire ant poison and went in the house thoroughly disgusted with burning feet. I put some ice and water in a pan and soaked my feet until the burning stopped and pondered the situation.

One of my sisters introduced me to ichthammol, or black drawing salve when we were in Costa Rica last Thanksgiving. It is primitive stuff--the active ingredient is shale oil extracted from somewhere on the planet. It works pretty well, but smells like tar, and is mixed with mineral oil and petroleum jelly. I had never tried it on ant bites, but thought this might be the time, to see if it would lessen the damage. I am very pleased with the results. It works much faster than baking soda and I had much less inflammation from this round of bites, and I really think they will be long gone by the wedding.

I never have gotten the trap back out. I am really sort of fearful of doing anything out on the grounds, though I know with all the rain we are getting, there will be mowing needed shortly. I guess I could start wearing my tall rubber boots all the time.....at least until after the wedding.

'Possum in the trap

After the cat episode several days ago, I left one of the traps out. It was one of our wooden box traps. Several years ago an aggressive raccoon began visiting the bird feeders. It was large, and would get on a feeder in the daylight and hunker down over the feed and growl if I walked out on the porch. It also destroyed a couple of hummingbird feeders. I tried catching it in a wire trap like you can buy at the hardware store. The old coon was so big that when the door came down its back end kept it from closing, so it got the bait and backed back out. I called the LDWF and asked for the trapper to make a visit. He came along in a couple of days, pulling a trailer with an ATV with several dead beavers strapped on the back. He had been at the country club trapping beavers on the golf course. He listened to my tale of woe and said he had a trap that he thought would work and he would drop it by in a few days. Sure enough, he came by later in the week with a fine trap made of plywood. I was very impressed with it and asked if I could take it to my carpenter and have him make me one. He said, "Certainly, a woman like you needs a couple of them." He went on to explain that one 4 x 8 sheet of plywood would make two. In the meantime, I set his trap that night and caught the large raccoon. Terry hauled it off to the swamp so it could become king or queen of the jungle.

Since that time, I have caught a whole bunch of critters in my traps, mostly armadillos. I didn't catch a cat in it, but set it up on the front porch, still set, last week. In the meantime, we are being visited by a third cat, about the same size as the other two. This one is black and white and comes up on the front porch every evening. Our cat has made watching for this cat a ritual, and lets out a true caterwaul every evening when it appears. It runs when we appear. Well, the weather was lovely this evening, so Terry and I ate our hamburgers he grilled for our supper on the front porch. At some point I noticed the trap was tripped. I figured the stray cat had bumped it. I was pretty sure it wouldn't go in since there wasn't any bait in it. I picked it up and it felt kind of heavy. I turned it on one end and peered down in it, surprised to see a young 'possum playing dead in the bottom. I had notice that an armadillo had been digging at the edge of the porch, so I dumped the 'possum out(it refused to crawl out; insisted on playing dead) and set the trap again, placing it parallel to the porch in hopes of catching the 'diller. Or 'dillers.

Here is a picture of one of the traps.

Summer Plague

August 28, 2009

I have a plague visiting Kalorama right now. It doesn’t seem to bother the visitors who come and go, but I assure you it bothers the curator on a daily basis. It is a tiny little flying insect called an eye gnat. It is actually a fly, and under close magnification resembles a tiny housefly. The males feed among the flowers. Pregnant females feed—warning, this is gross—on secretions of mammals. They don’t actually bite or suck fluids, but somewhere in their mouth parts there are some tiny little spines. Contact with those on the eyelids leads to conjunctivitis and is a common cause of pinkeye. They also seek out wounds and the base of hair follicles.

About the only good news about their habits and life cycle is that they do not lay eggs on mammals so we are not hosting their maggots. They lay their eggs in soil with rotting leaves and are especially fond of plowed or tilled soil with lots of organic matter. That means those armadillos that are plowing up the ground around the shrubs I am watering are catering to those flies. And the fly larva is doing a great service to the planet, along with the earthworms, breaking down organic matter.

This isn’t the first time they have been so bad. I have learned over the years that insect repellent doesn’t do much good. Glasses are somewhat helpful, until one figures out how to get behind them. Goggles are great. I have noticed that wearing a broad brimmed hat seems to baffle them, though after doing some reading on them, that apparently didn’t help the Lewis & Clark expedition. They were so bad yesterday that they were landing on my legs, arms, neck, and face. They impart the sensation of a single strand of hair on the skin and my experience is so bad than even inside, I am constantly aware of, well, the touch of a single strand of hair. So if you see me around town, well out of range of any eye gnats, swatting at myself, you know that I am having mental issues born of eye bug trauma.

Here are some recent pictures:

Spicebush butterfly on Butterflyweed. The butterfly lays her eggs on sassafras leaves at Kalorama.

This leopard frog is probably a parent to the tadpoles pictured in previous blog entries. It was hanging out in the top of a flower pot beside the fountain, very well disguised in the potting soil.

Gaura is a member of the primrose family. There are hybrid versions sold for summer landscaping that are much more compact and have deeper pink flowers than this tall, somewhat sprawling native. It is often infested with aphids which attracts smaller migrating birds in the fall. On hot days the flowers look like tiny white handkerchiefs draped all over the plant. Each flower only lasts one day.

Cat Tales

Three weeks ago while enjoying dinner with friends and family, one of them spotted a cat on the front porch, right outside the dining room, devouring a blue striped skink. The cat was a gray tabby that looked to be about half grown, as in small, but past the cute kitten stage. It ran away when it noticed all the humans looking at it.

Outside cats are a no-no at a nature preserve. Feral and domesticated cats allowed to roam outside play a factor in species decline in songbirds and other creatures within their native habitats all over the planet.

Within a few days, I again saw the gray cat. Every time I would enter the garage bays where the equipment is parked, it would shoot out and disappear. Then, I realized there were two cats. Most times when I would go out the front door to replenish the bird feeders, a calico cat about the same size would bolt out of the flower bed. Within a couple of days, there were enough feathers under one of the feeders for me to conclude that a blue jay had been taken, and maybe something else had lost some feathers in a fight. We got the live traps out of the garage and I set one near the feeder and the other in the garage. We had eaten boiled shrimp that evening for supper, so I used the tails and shells as bait. I also put out some cat food in the garage in hopes of relieving the pressure on the bird feeder. The next day, the feathers around the feeder where the trap was indicated that a cardinal had also met its maker. I removed that trap out of fear that the cat had used the trap to help it reach the feeder.

After I started putting food at the shed, I didn't see the calico around the front yard anymore. One day when I put food out, I called, "kitty-kitty," and the calico came running, mewing, and wrapping itself around my ankles. That confirmed what I already had figured. Someone had "gifted" us with these two cats. Yesterday, I discovered the trap at the garage was tripped, and sure enough, the gray cat was inside. I didn't know what I was going to do with the cats. Neither one of us has what it takes to terminate them. I didn't know anyone that wanted them, and I did ask around. I put some cat litter in a pan, and some food in a big pet cage and called the calico cat and put it in. The gray cat was not at all disposed to be friendly, but its situation wasn't friendly, so I didn't hold that against it. When I tried to empty it from the trap into the cage, it managed to escape. I was so aggravated. I am sure I will never catch it again. Unsure what to do with the calico, I finally got a hold of my friend who works with the humane society and she said I could bring it. Mind you, I told her it was a half grown kitten because I didn't know otherwise at the time. This morning I got the pet carrier that I use to take our house cat who is never allowed outside to the vet. I placed the calico inside the carrier, and began walking away from the garage toward my car. Now I have a pile of pine knots beside the driveway in front of the garage. The calico was very vocal the whole time, and as I started down the driveway, three tiny white kittens tumbled out from under the pine knots headed straight for us. Aaaargh!!!! I checked the calico, and sure enough, she had been nursing. I caught the kittens and put them in the carrier with her, and she immediately began licking and tending to them. I called my friend but couldn't get her. I headed in to town to the cat shelter where they seemed happy to take them. I gave them a check, too. So far today, I have not seen the gray cat, nor has any of the cat food at the garage disappeared. I am hoping it was so traumatized that it has left us for good. And I hope that the speckled kingsnake that lived in the garage has survived the cats.