Mammals
I dreamed last night that I opened the back door to let the dog in and six groundhogs let themselves in as well. They ignored me when I tried to shoo them off. Just lounged on the floor.
I realized today why we have the groundhogs. Last year a neighbor cat sat on the front sill and sniped rabbits coming out of the warren. Rabbits all dead: groundhogs move in.
Insects
Remember when we had the wee ants? And then we had the stocky black ants?
We also have the absurdly long-legged ants.
He called me into the kitchen to observe the ants that almost couldn’t move because they kept getting tangled up in their absurdly long legs.
I googled “long-legged ants.” Google win! Meet the Crazy Ant, also known as the Long-Legged Ant.
(Note the line drawing. There are many elegant photos of the long-legged crazy ant, and they are all under copyright. Artists love the long legs.)
Invasive of course. Can probably carry away a groundhog.
7 responses to “Wild Kingdom, Part 2”
I’m so envious of your groundhogs. All I have to offer are rats (http://www.travelskite.com/2011/09/sit-vac-rattenfanger.html) That’s until the bait starts to work, when I’ll probably have maggots drilling through the ceiling and dropping in my lap.
That happened at my (girls’) school once, and even though we were in the biology lab at the time, the shrieking was epic. Not many scientists amongst our lot.
I’ve had the BIG stocky black ants which I HATE with every fiber of my being. If I had these long legged creatures I may have to abandon my house. Although since I have the house sprayed every 4 months to keep the much hated ants away, I doubt they’d show their faces around here (fingers crossed).
Big Dot – Good god. I shrieked when I saw the groundhog up my arbor. I can imagine I’d shriek at Maggot Rain too.Kristie – I think Gary get his bloodlust out at the ants. Why spray when you can kill six in one blow?
Don’t mind spiders.Loathe any destructive bug that gets near my house.
Becs – Gary loves the spiders. Thats why the basement ceiling is festooned in spider webs. I think they vcall them “Ghost spiders.” Then again, I saw the sore the brown recluse left on Marcia’s leg. oozy.
You’ll never GUESS what happened this morning! I was vacuuming the living room (an event in itself, but that’s another story) and what did I find on the carpet? MAGGOTS! Two fat shiny squirming white maggots!! Looked suspiciously at the cats, peered under the furniture for corpses, checked my shoes for rotting tissue – and then remembered, thanks to this post, about that episode at school 40 years ago. Because the maggots were directly beneath the downlighter hole in the ceiling. Where there’s evidently a rat busily rotting right above my head. So now I can stop blaming the dog for that smell, at least…
Amazing how much better I feel, sharing my maggots with someone in Missouri.
Big Dot – I don’t think less of you because you have a constant rain of maggots on your head.