vermin of Georgia
Dec. 22nd, 2008 10:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fleaA series of personal anecdotes.
We have lived in GA for five months now (as of Thursday!) and have experienced 4 separate infestations.
1. Ants. We had sugar ants in the house as soon as we moved in, and they laughed at our ant baits, unlike the NC sugar ants. We never really found the solution. They waxed and waned (keeping the sink religiously free of unwashed dishes was the best success) until cold weather set in.
2. Roaches. Not the little German cockroaches that inhabit urban locations in the northeast, but "water bugs" - inch-plus long cockroaches that are native to the South and live outside. We see them, live or dead, fairly regularly in the house (like, every couple of weeks). I killed one yesterday right inside the front door. The worst incident was when one fell from the ceiling onto the face of sleeping (not for long!) mr. flea. I don't know that there's much that we can do to keep them out. I think they are mostly coming from outside, and the house is an old and leaky one. I see dead ones on the sidewalks around town regularly, even in winter. They're basically endemic. I am trying to get better at killing them. In general I am not freaked out by bugs, but I hate roaches and their scuttling, and these are so big that when you kill them they are mushy and gross.
3. Squirrels. Our house is in what was once a pecan grove, and there are 4 large trees in our back yard. Should we wish to harvest pecans, we would have to fight the very numerous and aggressive squirrels for them. Now that nut season has passed, the squirrels seem to have turned to digging up my bulbs (at least, there are suspicious-looking holes in a couple of places; we'll see come spring) and invading our attic. In our bedroom, which is the converted attic, we hear the ceiling squirrels fairly often. Sometimes they are almost certainly outside, but other times they seem to be inside. Outside, they seem to have largely eaten a piece of metal flashing below our bathroom window. Our neighbor noted that it was new flashing installed when the former owner was putting the house up for sale, so it has been half-destroyed by squirrels in less than a year. (Our neighbor also told me about the Rat Wars of '98. Shudder.)
4. Which brings us to the incident that prompted this post. Friday night mr. flea was in our downstairs bathroom, which has a one-piece tub and surround unit, the fiberglass kind. He heard scratching underneath the tub. He then went into the kitchen and hear scratching coming from one of our lower cabinets. This particular cabinet backs up against the bathroom wall and has a big hole cut into the back, presumably where someone was accessing the bathroom plumbing at some point. Inside the cabinet mr. flea discovered a large possum. He managed not to shriek, but closed the cabinet door right pronto, and locked it with a child lock. We haven't opened it since, but have also heard no noises. Perhaps Mr. Possum has exited the building through whatever hold in the crawl space he entered through. My dear friends on Facebook, however, have regaled me with tales of possums with nests of babies in the house. But it's not possum baby-having season, right? Right?
5. I also want to note that the giant prehistoric grasshoppers, known as lubbers, are evil. They probably can't be counted as vermin, since they are a native species and (so far) have not attempted to come inside the house. But they are freaky-scary and they eat garden plants, so they lose on both the aesthetic and practical fronts.
We have lived in GA for five months now (as of Thursday!) and have experienced 4 separate infestations.
1. Ants. We had sugar ants in the house as soon as we moved in, and they laughed at our ant baits, unlike the NC sugar ants. We never really found the solution. They waxed and waned (keeping the sink religiously free of unwashed dishes was the best success) until cold weather set in.
2. Roaches. Not the little German cockroaches that inhabit urban locations in the northeast, but "water bugs" - inch-plus long cockroaches that are native to the South and live outside. We see them, live or dead, fairly regularly in the house (like, every couple of weeks). I killed one yesterday right inside the front door. The worst incident was when one fell from the ceiling onto the face of sleeping (not for long!) mr. flea. I don't know that there's much that we can do to keep them out. I think they are mostly coming from outside, and the house is an old and leaky one. I see dead ones on the sidewalks around town regularly, even in winter. They're basically endemic. I am trying to get better at killing them. In general I am not freaked out by bugs, but I hate roaches and their scuttling, and these are so big that when you kill them they are mushy and gross.
3. Squirrels. Our house is in what was once a pecan grove, and there are 4 large trees in our back yard. Should we wish to harvest pecans, we would have to fight the very numerous and aggressive squirrels for them. Now that nut season has passed, the squirrels seem to have turned to digging up my bulbs (at least, there are suspicious-looking holes in a couple of places; we'll see come spring) and invading our attic. In our bedroom, which is the converted attic, we hear the ceiling squirrels fairly often. Sometimes they are almost certainly outside, but other times they seem to be inside. Outside, they seem to have largely eaten a piece of metal flashing below our bathroom window. Our neighbor noted that it was new flashing installed when the former owner was putting the house up for sale, so it has been half-destroyed by squirrels in less than a year. (Our neighbor also told me about the Rat Wars of '98. Shudder.)
4. Which brings us to the incident that prompted this post. Friday night mr. flea was in our downstairs bathroom, which has a one-piece tub and surround unit, the fiberglass kind. He heard scratching underneath the tub. He then went into the kitchen and hear scratching coming from one of our lower cabinets. This particular cabinet backs up against the bathroom wall and has a big hole cut into the back, presumably where someone was accessing the bathroom plumbing at some point. Inside the cabinet mr. flea discovered a large possum. He managed not to shriek, but closed the cabinet door right pronto, and locked it with a child lock. We haven't opened it since, but have also heard no noises. Perhaps Mr. Possum has exited the building through whatever hold in the crawl space he entered through. My dear friends on Facebook, however, have regaled me with tales of possums with nests of babies in the house. But it's not possum baby-having season, right? Right?
5. I also want to note that the giant prehistoric grasshoppers, known as lubbers, are evil. They probably can't be counted as vermin, since they are a native species and (so far) have not attempted to come inside the house. But they are freaky-scary and they eat garden plants, so they lose on both the aesthetic and practical fronts.
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Date: 2008-12-22 04:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-22 04:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-22 04:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-22 05:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-22 05:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-22 05:32 pm (UTC)There are sprays that you can use on thresholds and places you think they might be getting in. Dead roaches suck, but are better than live ones.
(Have they flown at you yet?)
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Date: 2008-12-22 05:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-22 05:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-22 05:48 pm (UTC)Our departure from SC was partially motivated by my inability to cope with palmetto bugs. I had one fall on me, too.
We have done better using animals to get rid of animals than anything we can manage; have you considered a dog? Molly is v. diligent about keeping the squirrels out of our place, and I haven't seen any more mice since the boys came to live with us (they've also done a number on the pantry moths). I've come to the conclusion that there's a reason we engineered domesticated animals when we became sedentary, and that the reason is because we are really not equipped with the right parts to go after vermin ourselves.
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Date: 2008-12-22 06:50 pm (UTC)We may eventually get a dog, although I am not a Dog Person, and we have the troublesome problem that nobody is home between 7:30 and 5:30 5 days a week, which seems unfair to most dogs, who are so uncatlike in their sociability.
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Date: 2008-12-22 07:48 pm (UTC)Yeah, Molly is much happier when we're away now that she has the chickens to watch. But I think it depends a lot on the dog. I've certainly known people who have dogs who're at home ten or twelve hours a day.
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Date: 2008-12-22 06:13 pm (UTC)exterminatorswildlife extraction technicians.They probably can't do much about the roaches, though. You might consider house lizards....
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Date: 2008-12-22 07:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-22 06:21 pm (UTC)We haven't opened it since, but have also heard no noises. Perhaps Mr. Possum has exited the building through whatever hold in the crawl space he entered through.
Or perhaps he's playing possum.
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Date: 2008-12-22 06:51 pm (UTC)Little rotters.
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Date: 2008-12-22 07:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-23 03:16 am (UTC)I've found that the best device for killing them are Reader's Digest Condensed Books. We have a lot of the books and the bugs at the beach, and I discovered that the only good use for a Reader's Digest condensed Book is killing roaches. They aren't too heavy, they are nice and square and can be flung -- if necessary -- with some accuracy. Plus you don't see the dead bug after it's squashed and most of the bug sticks the book. And those Condensed books were one of the few books I never minded throwing away.
.. and I should probably spare you the tale of my uncle and the opossums under the house...
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Date: 2008-12-23 04:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-23 04:33 am (UTC)I don't know what's up with the ants. I never had ants until this year, but this summer I had a practically continuous line marching across the counter.
I have become inured to palmetto bugs, and I'd rather have them than the smaller German roaches. I had an apartment that when you turned on the light, it looked like the counter was moving. At least palmetto bugs don't come in packs. The possum would have freaked me the hell out, though. They are evil hissing prehistoric creatures.
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Date: 2008-12-23 05:26 pm (UTC)I have an unfinished romance novel on my hard-drive that opens with the heroine (a former Big City girl) finding a possum in the kitchen cupboard of her new apartment.
Yes, the further south you go, the more life there is, everywhere, all the time. But I'm surprised you didn't have a lot in N.C. -- maybe it's because your setting was more urban.