Perhaps taking a cue from the Cellular Toad, a slug took up residence in one of Mary’s transplant trays:
Unlike the toad, this one didn’t live to tell the tale…
Tag: Wildlife
Other creatures in our world
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Peacock in Deployed Mode
I tagged along on a Master Gardener trip to Weathersfield and found this fellow confined to a cage:
Peacock – stowed view His companion was a pure white (leucistic, not albino) female:
Leucistic Peahen Shortly thereafter, he deployed for action. Part of the dance involves rattling all those quills:
Peacock – side view I had no idea peacocks have wooly white underwear!
Peacock – stern view The female remained utterly uninterested throughout the entire show; evidently, one can get used to anything if it happens often enough.
Raj, our correspondent from India, surely has these things like we have turkeys: enough to be a nuisance.
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Bedbugs Redux
Mary quite deliberately brought home a pair of bedbugs… even knowing what we went through, you cannot imagine how dead those things had to be. She doesn’t just want them dead, she wants them extinct.
Anyhow.
Some pix, atop a scale with 0.5 mm divisions:
Bedbug – 4 mm – dorsal 
Bedbug – 4 mm – ventral 
Bedbug – 6 mm – dorsal 
Bedbug – 6 mm – ventral 
Bedbug – 6 mm – mouthparts They were actually on load from Cornell’s Co-op lab, having recently been distinguished from bat bugs.
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Roof Work: Vent Stack Gaskets and Shingle Fungus
Part of the spring ritual involves cleaning the maple seeds out of the gutters, which also gives me an opportunity to inspect things up there. This year brought a revolting discovery:
Rotted vent stack gasket It seems the rubber (?) seals around all three vent stack pipes have disintegrated. Now, the contractor installed these as part of the re-roofing project late in the last millennium, so it’s not like they came with the house. They’re an exact match for what’s currently available at Home Depot and I have no reason to believe new ones will last any longer. Sheesh.
The correct fix involves removing the shingles around the existing aluminum plates, installing new plates, and then replacing the shingles. That seems unwarranted, seeing as how the aluminum remains nicely bonded to everything, so I slipped some solid polyethylene shields around the vent stacks, tucked them under the uphill shingles, and hope that’ll suffice.
The discoloration on the roof is getting worse, except downhill from the chimney’s copper flashing. You can see one of the ugly new black plastic vent seals over on the right:
Copper effect on roof discoloration I suspect the copper ions kill off the fungus, so, invoking Science, I tucked a foot of copper wire under the ridge vent uphill from a patch of fungus:
Anti-fungal copper wire test We’ll see if that makes any difference. I suppose the next time I’m up there I should tuck a strip of copper flashing under the shingle on the other side of the chimney to see if a bit more surface area will have more effect.
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Look Alive!
You know how, in those old cartoons, whenever the vultures started landing in nearby trees, that was an indication of trouble ahead for the hero?
Turkey Vulture in pine tree The local Turkey Vulture flock has a roost a few miles away and they’re often seen circling in the thermals overhead.
A few years ago I encountered one dismantling a squirrel flapjack on the road:
Vulture dismantling squirrel It’s an ugly job, but somebody’s got to do it…
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Bugged ATX Supply
I intend to use an ATX power supply as a cheap source of bulk +12 V and +5 V power for the resistors on those heatsinks. I have a 250 W box on the shelf (harvested from a dead donor PC) that seemed ideal; they run more efficiently with higher loads and I only need 150-ish W.
Being that type of guy, I opened it up to see what’s inside…
Damaged ATX Supply Huh. Looks like some small creature of the night immolated itself down there in the lower left corner, tucked against the transformer. There’s nothing more than black goo and charred filaments left over, with green-blue corrosion creeping up the resistor lead.
Or maybe it’s actually toxic snot from the manufacturing line. Hard to say at this point.
The power supply tester says the juice comes out fine & dandy, so I might use the thing after trying to get the gunk out.
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Bed Bugs: Wrapup
So there you have it: the bugs that killed three months.
We’ve gone a month without a bite and are only now restoring furniture to the bedroom. Each piece goes up on powder traps and gets a week in isolation to reveal any bugs before we reload the drawers with clean clothing. After vacuuming and washing there shouldn’t be any bugs left on the furniture, if the piece had any to begin with. Almost certainly that is wasted effort, but …
Maybe next year we’ll buy new chairs and a couch for the living room. For sure, they won’t have plush, overstuffed upholstry.
With any luck (and the regular use of a hot box disinsector), you won’t go through what we did.
However, should you discover a row of bites across your body, the actions you take during the next few days will determine the level of catastrophe during your next year. The problem will not go away by ignoring it; if you get a breeding population going in your house / apartment / condo, you will definitely need a commercial pest-control service.
If you think tossing out some furniture to get rid of a few bugs is expensive: just wait.
Good luck!
The rest of (this chapter of) the Bed Bug Story:
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 