A Fox in a Box
When the boys were small, they had a book they read over and over and OVER, that had the phrases:
A fox in a box. . .
A fox wearing socks. . .
A fox on a box full of locks, rocks and clocks.
Predator Party
It’s not good when there are predators that think your farm is a great place to party, mainly because 
they love the bountiful buffet.
No, not good at all.
“You don’t know what you have until its gone . . .”
Rats & Chicks
Well, Rats…
So remember me talking about clearing rats out of the feedroom back in February? They made a stinking mess (literally), and chewed up a years worth of peacock feathers to making nesting material, and ate who knows how much of the peafowl’s food. I finally realized they were even getting into the bag of large-sized dog bone treats, and munching their way through those as well.
Anyway, we cleaned out the mess in the feed room, and everything was put in metal cans. That included putting any peafowl food that didn’t get eaten during the day into a metal can at night (sorry guys, no more midnight snacks).
Periodical Cicadas
Bug-eyed monster movie coming now to a city near you! No wait, this isn’t a “B” rated movie, this is the real deal! And these bug-eyed monsters might be in YOUR area NOW!!!
They’re called Periodical Cicadas. They belong to the order Hemiptera, suborder Homoptera and family Cicadidae. In this part of the world, they belong to the genus Magicicada.
They are emerging this year, 2011, in these areas of the midwest and southeastern United States:
See the dots? If you live there... they're coming!
How will you know if they are in your area? All you have to do is LISTEN. The males make a distinctive sound by flexing their tymbals, which are drum-like organs found on their abdomens. How does this work?
They contract their internal tymbal muscles and that produces a clicking sound as the tymbals buckle inwards. When the muscles relax, the tymbals return to their original position producing another click. The interior of the male abdomen is substantially hollow to amplify the resonance of the sound.
Once a lot of them have emerged, the sound can get pretty loud out there! Here’s a sample of the cicadas noise, so you can hear what they sound like. (Once you click on ‘cicadas noise’, a player should open in a new window.)
No wonder their name, cicada, is derived from the Latin word for “buzzer”!
All That Remains
If you can’t hear, you can see clues they are emerging. Look for the remains! In this case, the empty shells, or exoskeleten they leave behind.
A pair of exoskeletons
Here’s a close-up of one:
An empty shell is all that remains.
The empty shells are all over the place, but what about the adults?
Periodic Cicada (Magicicada genus)
.
Another Periodic Cicada 'Bug-Eyed Monster'
Yes, they’re all over the place too!
These periodical cicadas are also known as “17-year locusts” although they’re not really locusts, and they also come in a 13-year cycle variety.
And although there are a lot of them at once, and that might look intimidating, they are actually harmless insects. Cicadas don’t bite or sting. They are not venomous, and there is no evidence that they transmit diseases.
Cicadas generally do not pose a threat to vegetation, However, young plants may be damaged by excessive feeding or egg laying. For that reason, it’s better not to plant new trees or shrubs just before an emergence of the periodical cicadas to be on the safe side. Mature plants usually do not suffer lasting damage even from a mass emergence.
And if you’re hungry, lots of people think cicadas are a tasty treat. Especially the females, as they’re meatier.
Yum, yum. Anybody got recipes?
Rats!
I know there are people with pet rats. I’m sure they are wonderful pets, but I just can’t see it. Especially not after the mess we cleaned up this weekend.
First off, I made two serious mistakes that contributed to this problem.
- I stored a season’s worth of peacock feathers in the feed room.
- I also stored some baling twine in the feedroom.
Why was this a problem? Well, the rats seemed to think chewed-up feathers and twine fluff make quite excellent nests.
They had a regular habitat built, a warren of rats, hiding behind barrels and the metal trash cans we use to store feed. It was sheltered from the wind, they had nice little insulated nests, what with the feathers and twine, so what more could they want?
Oh, yeah. They needed food.
And they found a plentiful supply.
We’d been noticing the peafowl’s food bowl was emptying out mighty fast. Every morning… empty! And we figured it highly unlikely the peafowl all of a sudden wanted so much more food. It didn’t take a great leap of imagination to figure the rats were helping themselves at night after the peafowl went to roost. So although they couldn’t get to the feed in the metal cans in the feed room, they still had nice high-protein chow at the local Peafowl Restaurant.
And then there was the smell. A colony of rats, little rat calling cards everywhere, and worse, rat urine. Really, REALLY bad.
So Saturday we had a nice, warm day, and The Farmer figured it was a good day to clean out the feed room. While I was at the grocery store, he started in, so I didn’t get to see the first wave of rats leaving the sinking ship. They had a huge nest built in the corner behind a couple of metal trash cans. . .
All this in one nesting area!
By all accounts, when he started pulling this out, the rats went everywhere! Up the walls, out the door, out a hole in the window screen (and here we’d been blaming squirrels for that hole…).
The twine was wrapped around stuff in the feed room, and was very difficult to work loose. We had to do a lot of cutting to get it out. Then The Farmer carried big shovels full of the stuff to a pile outside and burnt it.
Burn the filthy stuff!
Toby was going nuts and constantly getting in the way.
"I know something is there!"
He could smell the rats had been there, and he could hear the little babies squeaking. Not to mention a few mummified remains of deceased rodents.
A generation past, and the next generation to come...
We did not allow the next generation to mature.
It was a long, dirty, tiring job. We scraped up caked poop, nesting materials and urine. We swept and swept. We could not get every last bit off the floor or from between the outer wall and joists. But we got most of it. The feedroom looks a lot better, and it sure smells a lot better!
As for the Peacock Restaurant, it has been closed down. Every night we bring the bowl of feed in and stick it in a metal can where the rats can’t get to it. So we have evicted them from their home, and taken away their easy food supply. I was feeling pretty good about all that until the Cave Geek wondered if they might decide to try living in OUR house next.
I could have done without that thought. . .