cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fauna of my House I'm pretty much in favor of spiders. There are many spiders in my house and I let most of them be. If a web is made in an inconvenient spot then obviously it must be removed. But a web in a corner out of the way will usually be left alone until the spider is through with it. I figure that if a spider appears to be making a living in the house, then it naturally follows that there must be insects of some sort that they are eating. I'd rather have one spider in the house than the hundred or so insects that it will probably catch over the course of it's life. There are 2 exceptions. Black widows and wolf spiders. We have both on our property. Wolf spiders are not tolerated in the house and will be killed on sight, though I leave them be when I see them outdoors. Black widows are killed on sight anywhere on my land or in my house. I run across them now and then and have no patience for something that could kill one of my children with a single bite. Black widow venom is about 15 times more potent than that of a rattlesnake. Fortunately, it's a relatively small volume of venom that is injected into the bite and when diffused throughout an adult body, death rarely results. But the effect on a child weighing less than 40 pounds is naturally going to be far worse and potentially fatal. Wolf spiders are poisonous and they do bite people, but I'm not aware of anyone ever being killed by the bite of a North American species of wolf spider. Hence the slightly more liberal policy for them. Being me, naturally I have been in on the shooting of a number of spiders in my time. Just a few weeks ago, Lars was over at my place and we were shooting clays. We'd gone through half the box when I realized that there was a black widow sitting in there amongst the clays where we'd been putting our hands the whole time. Very, very carefully we took all of the remaining clays out of the box until there was nothing left. It turned out that there were actually 2 of them in there. Lars had his .22 pistol on him, so we shot both of them. That is harder than it sounds, even from only 6 feet away. It is a very small target and it took a few tries for each one. Now and then I will find a wolf spider indoors that has made one of those enormous web tunnels some place dreadfully inconvenient. Like between the DVD player and the stereo. The best thing in this case is one of those airsoft guns that shoots the little BB sized plastic balls. Those things will not even break the skin if you fire it into your hand from 12 inches away but they are just the ticket for taking out a spider inside of a tunnel without putting a hole through the DVD player. We get other wildlife in the house as well and I have policies on all of those species as well. Snakes get shot on sight, unless they are small, non-poisonous and in a spot where I can easily catch them to take them outside. Like a little ring-neck that I found last week. Insectivore, 8 inches long. Harmless, so I let him go. Rats are shot on sight, which I have written about here quite a bit in the past. Mice are live-trapped and released in the woods way away from the house. Although when mice sometimes get caught in glue traps that I have put out for rats, there's not much of anything I can do for them. The mouse cannot be released without horribly mutilating it's feet so I do kill those ones as a matter of mercy. Lizards show up from time to time. Blue-tailed skinks in the bathroom, most often. But I have found some skinks in the attic, where I think they like to spend the winter. The skinks are kind of cute and I don't mind them at all. They're eating insects and generally helping out. I doubt that many of them make it through the winter in the attic on account of the 6 foot black snake that lives up there. There was a much larger lizard of some sort that I spotted amid Trish's laundry on the floor of the bedroom last month. I tried to catch it, thought I had it wrapped up in a shirt but it turned out to be empty. I looked everywhere but never did figure out where the hell it had gone. Whatever it is, it's harmless and I'm not at all worried. I think we had a couple of squirrels trying to make a go of it in the attic when we first moved in. We would hear them up there all the time. It only lasted for about a week or so until the noises suddenly stopped. My assumption has always been that the attic snake finally caught up with them. It's the kind of thing that has made me deathly afraid of my own attic and I rarely go up there unless there's no choice. 11:32 - 2008-05-23 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
||||||
|
||||||