![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vermin of Georgia
Dec. 22nd, 2008 10:46 amA 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.
