Classicman, holy crap!!

How goes it, man?

Good to see ya posting!

classicman, thanks for saving me the trouble! Good catch.

Also, really good to see you posting again!

Hey Classic, nice to see you.

I was out in Lancaster County yesterday and we were just sitting in the back yard shooting the shit. Spent half the time swatting or stepping on Spotted Lanternflies. They're an invasive Asian first spotted about 20 miles from the Walmart where Stinkbugs first arrived, but now a third of PA is infested.

Very wild life...

The whatever-it-is on the left seems somewhat overmatched by the whatever-it-is on the right.

Wolf, and dire wolf?

I think wolf and, based on the cat tail, a badly drawn lion.

Cat tail, maybe paws too, but not even close to a cat head.

This guy was calmly patrolling his neighborhood this morning.
Attachment 71420


He only paused and looked up at me when I tapped on the window. Very handsome fellow.
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Wile E.!
Well fed and maintained.
Smoke?

He does look like peak coyote, doesn't he?

Much, much smoke.

He's well tuned.

Not as big as ours, but that 'yote looks pretty dang healthy.

I glanced at this picture then had to back up and look again because something was wrong about it...

Attachment 71482

It took me a couple of minutes to figure out what was wrong.

It was upside down...

Attachment 71483

Cats can really get down, they look like that Fordzilla race car where the wheel arch is the tallest thing you see...

Attachment 71485

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By hanging out in a blind for hours and hours a Dentist finally got this first known picture of a fledgling.
The dark beak is proof it's young.

Attachment 71573

After all the King deserves respect...

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I have my trail cam set out, charged up and waiting for a repeat of the evening before last when I got up during the 6 o'clock news and looked out of my living room window at the front lawn and watched a bear walk by. About ten feet away.
I am still a little buzzed by the sight since I have lived in this admittedly rural area for 48 years and never seen a bear closer than ten miles away and then up in the hills.
He wasn't a very big or old black bear, maybe 150-200 pounds and not black but brown.
I closed some doors and followed his wanderings around the yard through different windows. He got to a corner with a closed gate and reversed his route, ending up in a clump of berry bushes.
I alerted some neighbors, made sure the cat was inside, put a ten round mag in the Mini-14 and ventured out with no good plan.
My young neighbor came over with his deer rifle and we tried to locate Mr. Bruin for about a half hour before decided he had left the area the way he came.
Checking with some folks across the road and with a vineyard next to wilder country turned out they saw a family regularly munching their pinot noir.
OK. A bear. My first one, never even showing up on critter cam. Never any scat or overturned trash cans, including the ones lined up every week along the road.
So I guess I will pay a little more attention for a while dusk to dawn.
There will be a related post tomorrow in the guns thread.

My FB people have already seen, the mountains and foliage are not the only beauty we have seen this NH trip. Driving down a back road through the forest and we came across this beast.

http://cellar.org/img/nhmoose.jpg

Tesla be verwy verwy quiet.

747 won the Fat Bear Contest this year...

Nice work 747!

I saw a fisher cat yesterday, that was pretty cool.

You mean one o'these?:

Attachment 71687

Yeah, a chocolate brown oversize weasel. I hear they are hell on chickens but security is pretty tight here.

I was neck deep in the river, leaning back against the bank, and one of them (we call them fishers 'round h'yere) came hiking down the creekbank, came within about 6 feet of me. Gave no indication he knew I was there. I think he had somewhere to be.

I hope this poor baby doesn't get carbon fiber splinters in his gums...

Yee. Ikes.



Link to UPI article

Wow. Shitty day

Good kitty

I think my instinct would be to throw rocks immediately, probably get me killed.

She just wanted him gone and her actions were to menace not attack.
Effective as hell, I'd say.

Attachment 71748
Caught a flying squirrel in the floor joist cavity. With a towel.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You need to floss your floor joists as well as brush them.

So there had been an occasional rustle coming from the eaves. I thought it was birds in the gutter outside. My wife thought it was a mouse in the eaves. So she got me to set several mouse traps. I also set a big rat snap trap. I was skeptical. That was a week ago.

This morning at 6am we woke to a loud snapping sound and a small animal dragging a trap around in the eaves in our bedroom. We've got lots of suitcases and stuff stored in there, and it was banging its way all around our stuff in the eaves with a snap trap attached to it. Then I heard two more loud snaps as it spasmed into other traps I set.

Not what you want to hear. I was hoping for a loud snap and then silence.

We listened to it drag itself around in the eaves and then it dropped down into one of the joist cavities and started dragging itself across the living room ceiling and across the ceiling in my daughter's bedroom.

I figured it would die in a day or two, and I just wanted to track where it was so I could cut a hole in the ceiling and retrieve the rotting body.

So I began my work day, sitting at the computer in my makeshift office, and just made a point of paying attention to where it was.

Then I heard it from the eaves in my office (my son's bedroom). I had been thinking about how to catch it, and decided a towel thrown over it would be the safest thing. Leather gloves, of course. I moved a shitload of my son's furniture out of the way so I could open the hatch of his eaves, and when I got the hatch cracked open slightly, I saw the flying squirrel just sitting there in my flashlight's beam with a plastic mouse trap clamped to its face. I wasn't suited up yet and didn't have a towel to throw over it, so I closed the hatch and got my stuff together.

I came back and opened the hatch, and the flying squirrel was gone.

So I turned back to my actual job and got a lot of work done. Eventually, in the late afternoon, I heard the squirrel again in the same eaves, so I quietly put on all my gear. I opened the hatch and saw it way at the back of the eaves where a tiny little passage about 4 inches wide leads to the wall behind the bathtub. I climbed into the dusty eaves, and crawled toward the squirrel. It was hung up between a stud and the bathroom vent duct, and was trying to back away from me, but the mouse trap was snagging on the stud.

I grabbed for it and pulled it toward me. In my movement doing that, I knocked the mousetrap clamped to its face right off. It was momentarily stunned, with my headlamp shining right into its night vision eyes, and I grabbed frantically for it with just my gloves on as it tried to start running away. I was able to grab it, and shove it into the towel. I kind of wadded the towel up around it and then backed slowly out of the eaves. Went downstairs, looking like a madman, and asked my daughter to drive me to the local woods, 6 blocks away, where I could release it from my tight grip.

So she did. And when I unfurled the towel to let it go, the dead flying squirrel dropped onto the ground. Apparently holding a squirrel in a death grip for a few minutes will actually kill it.

At least it will rot in the woods and not in my ceiling.

I just bought a real trap on Amazon, so if another one gets in, I can actually trap it in a way that it won't go dragging the trap around.

This is a nice thread :)

you are truly weird

That kind of intimate gruesomeness is an acquired taste. You are so lucky though. My BIL emeritus had a squirrel die in a wall cavity in a bathroom (old victorian house, behind a steam radiator in front of wallpapered plaster and lath wall) He and SIL emeritus decided that it wasn't worth the cost to remove it. That bathroom stank for a decade or more.


I have a woodpecker visiting my house. Disturbingly, the specific area that I just installed new trim.

The horror! Seriously. I would never put up with that.

ETA... the wood pecker just likes hearing himself.

LOL (several times) :rotflol:

Some days you are chronically verbose and some days you just NAIL IT with minimal comment. Love it. Variety is the spice of life and all...

Yesterday, I was walking around the house with binoculars, looking for any little gaps where a squirrel could possibly get in.

I finally found it. Under the valley flashing over our front porch. You don't notice the gap unless you are really looking. I got the ladder out and shined a flashlight up under the valley flashing. In the gleam of the flashlight, you can see that animals have been using it as a highway. There's a dirt pattern that couldn't have been made any other way.



So I bent a piece of sheet aluminum and riveted it under the valley flashing to close the gap.

rats with tails

bleuch. I struggle to keep the mice out of the basement. And those darn woodpeckers! Pretty and I like the sound.... but not on my house, please?

Aren't those rats?:eyebrow:

they are. rats with wings maybe?

Those are Bats I think.

if the wings have feathers, it's pigeons