Animals

An open letter to the spiders in my house

by Veronica on June 1, 2011

[No photos because I haven’t taken any.]

Dear Spiders that live in my house,

I’m officially putting you on notice.

Up until this point in time, you’ve been allowed to live in various corners, without being molested, squashed or destroyed. I allowed you to do this in the hope that you would do something either a) interesting or b) useful – both of those things involving flies.

If I thought I was seeing a noticeable difference in the amount of house flies I was seeing inside the house, I would not be writing this. If you were doing something interesting, like eating flies, or spinning webs, you would also not be in trouble.

I let you stay, hoping that I would be able to photograph a decent insect massacre, or show the children how you kill flies, but it appears that all you’re doing is creating unfancy dust collectors in my corners and threatening to bite me when I drop the curtain rod on myself.

You’ve got one more week. If I don’t see any improvement in your behaviour by then, I’m going to vacuum you.

You’ve been warned.

Sincerely,

Not Impressed With Your Behaviour House Owner.

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Evolutionary Sheep

by Veronica on May 2, 2011

in Animals, Gotta Laugh

I have sheep in the paddock next to me and they are learning to fly.

Oh, I know that you think that this is pure hyperbole, but it’s true. They’ve evolved and they’re desperately trying to be birds instead of sheep.

I was lucky to get these photos, because shortly after, they spotted me watching, jumped off their perches and ran away, trying to cheep instead of bleat.

This one is Harrold.

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If I see one more mouse skitter through my kitchen, sohelpmegod!

by Veronica on April 29, 2011

in Animals, Gotta Laugh

With my recent posts on Asylum Seekers and my silence on the drama that continues to annoy me, you would be forgiven for thinking that I’m all ‘Live and Let Live!’.

I am not.

Especially not when it comes to roosters that are attacking my hens, drakes that are looking large enough to fit nicely in a roasting tray and mice.

I normally have a “don’t kill anything you’re not going to eat” policy. I can maintain this policy in the face of everything, except mice.

We have a mouse problem. Our mouse problem is so bad that I’ve schwacked two personally in the last week, making my mouse death count higher than the cats, although the second death is maybe only 50% mine, because I did require a cat to finish it off. Hiding under the oven gets you NO MERCY.

For the record, a good schwacker is one that is covered in plastic, so that you can wipe it clean of mouse eyeballs afterwards. You’re welcome.

***

We were moving the furniture around, rearranging couches and assorted piles of junk when Nathan shouts “MOUSE!”

Of course, I came running, from where I was avoiding heavy lifting by messing around on twitter and talking to my mother on the phone.

Tucking the phone between my shoulder and ear, I spotted the mouse immediately (with a little help from Nathan). Nat was holding one end of a couch in the air and the mouse was attempting to run away. Round and round we went, me chasing and the mouse skittering, with Nathan swearing at me to ‘just fucking kill it already, what ARE YOU DOING?’

Our brilliant teamwork paid off, as I walked to the back of the couch and went ‘Huh, where’d it go?’ only to lean down and find it, clinging to the back of the couch at eye level with me. I’m not sure who was more startled, but I certainly jumped less.

The mouse found a hiding spot and I picked up a schwacker that was lying around. Sometimes there are benefits to messy bedrooms.

“You drop the couch and I’ll schwack it” I said to Nathan.

He rolled his eyes at me, knowing how well my schwacking has gone in the past and did as he was told.

The mouse took one look at me, sitting in front of it, holding a photo album as a schwacker and then did the most sensible thing possible.

It ran towards me, like a suicide mouse.

So I sensibly schwacked it on the head, killing it. I still had the phone tucked between my ear and my shoulder, giving running commentary to my mother the whole time.

I dusted myself off, and left Nathan to clean up the squashed mouse, while I finished my conversation and wiped down the photoalbum with anti bacterial stuff.

***

Mice – 2543 Veronica – 2 .

I am very proud of my two kills.

Today there is a new mouse skittering around underneath my grill. I’m hoping to avoid having to bash it to death personally – you’d never guess it but I’m really not a fan of killing things – and have instead set a trap. I’d like to kill it before I have to scrub everything with antibacterial soap again.

Hell, I’d even like to be all zen about having mice in the house, but OMFG I JUST SAW ONE, RUNNING ACROSS MY CHOPPING BOARD. Again.

They’re lucky I’m not a farmers wife.

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Let’s talk about ducklings. Again.

by Veronica on March 16, 2011

in Animals

The unusual thing about this photo is not that I have ducklings sitting on my bench in a container – again, it’s that there are three of them and I found them before they’d started the dying process seriously. We could also argue that I probably shouldn’t put cold ducklings into a refrigerator box, but that box was the only one handy as I had handfuls of ducklings and anyway, it’s sitting on a hot water bottle.

3 days after I had 17 ducklings stolen, I had another 9 hatch to the last duck sitting. These are the last ducklings of the season, before the long cold months send the ducks off the lay and mean that any ducks unfortunate enough to try sitting will likely lose their eggs to the cold, or newborn babies to a frost.

These nine ducklings were doing really well – the mother is relatively good at it and everything was going perfectly.

But I found a duckling dead this morning and so I when we got home from dropping Amy at school, I did a quick look around and found these three babies doing quite badly. Quite badly means that they didn’t run away, or flail about when I picked them up to bring inside.

I’m not sure if it’s the cold damp weather, or what’s going on, but they should be okay now. All three have had some sugar water and I can hear quiet peeping from behind my monitor, so I suspect a full recovery will be made. In fact if the panicked peeping when they just saw Nathan is any indication, then they’ll be fine.

Ducklings are fragile creatures and I can see why clutches of up to 20 are hatched, when they seem to die at drop of a hat. Not like baby chickens, who are tough and can be brought back to health from the brink of death.

On the stolen duckling front, we still don’t know anything. The local policeman called in yesterday to see if we had heard anything, but we haven’t and neither has he, which is frustrating.

So that’s me.

What’s the strangest thing sitting on your bench today?

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Sometimes, people are utter bastards. So is the weather.

by Veronica on March 5, 2011

in Animals, Garden, Headfuck

On top of the stress, some bastard stole 17 of my ducklings.

I am, as you can expect, rather angry about this.

The ducklings were here and accounted for at 4.30pm when we got home from Isaac’s psych assessment and I couldn’t see them at 7pm last night when I was on the phone to Mum. At the time, of course, I just assumed that the mother had put them and herself to bed already, and I filled up the water containers, didn’t bother doing a full head count and went back inside.

This morning when I woke up to a frost, I figured I’d best check to make sure everything had survived the night.

Outside, I found 3 ducklings with one mother and one mother with no babies at all.

A quick walk around the paddock found one duckling in a nest that they’d slept in, obviously suffocated – this duckling belonged with the 3 other live babies. (How can I tell you ask? They were slightly different colours, because of a 2 day age difference). Obviously that mother had slept indoors with her 4 babies.

A long slow walk around the paddock turned up nothing.

A detailed examination of all the water containers, the blackberries, the septic tank, the marshy back corner and ALL the surrounding paddocks (risking electrocution and plover attacks), plus the sides of the road and the paddock across the road, showed nothing.

17 ducklings, vanished.

Last night, as I cooked dinner, Maisy barked at the window. We ignored it, being busy, figuring she was barking at the cat. Now, we assume she was barking at whoever was in the yard, stealing ducklings. Cars and people stop at the front of our house all of the time, so it’s not something we pay attention to anymore.

Moral of the story? Always check when the dog is barking. Always.

I’ve been on the phone to the police this morning who agree with me, that losing 17 is definitely theft, as a hawk or snake would only take 1-2, and not 17 in a 3 hour time frame. And if they’d died of anything else, I would have found remains.

I am so upset. They’re only 4-5 days old and so so fragile still. They won’t survive if they’re separated from each other and they’re probably already doing badly without their mother. I’m worried about them, hand rearing ducklings is hard work. The RSPCA has also been notified, so that they know to ring me if ducklings start arriving there.

On top of the duckling theft, we had a major frost that wasn’t forecast on my weather forecast and I lost nearly the entire contents of my garden.

All of my tomatoes are dead, or dying. I didn’t even get any to ripen on the bush this year. I’ll save what I can for green tomato chutney and for ripening inside, but still. That’s over 100 tomato plants dead.

All my pumpkins died. I was able to rescue 3 half grown pumpkins off the vines, but all the vines are dead.

All of the zucchini. All of the corn, the basil, the cucumbers.

Everything.

You know how sometimes it just feels like too much? Yeah, this is too much. The stuff in my garden was for preserving and bottling, to get us through winter, on a tight budget. The ducklings would have been sold at the growers market in a few months.

I am Not Impressed.