My shop is for the birds.

[Leo_Gnardo]

the size of your stack always matters! Just ask ol' Jim

Yeeaahhh....... THAT stack !

I was also thinkin' "Electric Aunt Jemima" wont'cha cook a batch for me.

Please don't be drinking anything while listening to that tune as you may laugh so hard it will come out your nose.

Cicada invasion around here turned out to be a flop. Heard a couple, saw exactly one.

My neighbor and I successfully relocated 1 momma and 4 pup groundhogs within the last week. Peanuts got the first 4 into traps but it took gourmet bait - pistachios - to get the last one to "volunteer" to leave.

Cockroaches pack it in permanently with two weeks in deep freeze, any way you can do it. Outdoors in the winter, or fit the gear into a freezer (tightly bagged up of course) if you don't want to use poisons and you do have the space.

(Walter Cronkite voice) - "And that's the way it is."

I'm gonna bug out now.

[Enzo]

Back when the shop was in Lansing's "Old Town" section, across the street from Elderly Instruments, we kept getting entry alarms at night. They'd run to the shop, but no one was there, and nothing missing. This went on for several weeks, until one night the landlord was looking around the back warehouse area, and his flashlight found a pair of glowing raccoon eyes staring back at him. And then her babies' three more pair. Relocate the wildlife, and no more breakins.

[Leo_Gnardo]

his flashlight found a pair of glowing raccoon eyes staring back at him. And then her babies' three more pair.

Those raccoons heard about your chili Enzo. Can't say I blame 'em for trying to get to some of it.

One got into our groundhog trap a couple days ago. Gave him a free get out of jail pass - this time.

[daz]

This is going to sound like a BS story because it's hard to believe anybody could be this stupid, but I swear on a stack, it's absolutely true. I once got in 3 Yamaha DX7 keyboards from a school. They had a cockroach problem at the school and the little buggers had infested the keyboards. Their solution? Throw the keyboards in the school's swimming pool to drown them! Now you've got dead cockroaches AND waterlogged keyboards.

Sounds similar to something that happened to me decades ago. I picked up a univox SS amp from a classified ad. the guy lived in a somewhat seedy apartment. I go it home to find some cockroaches in the back. i quickly brought it outside to the street for fear they'd get in the house and create a cockroach colony. I took the chassis out and the chassis was FULL of them ! Apparently they were using the amp as a breeding ground and there had to be several hundred of them.

[Steve Conner]

I once got in 3 Yamaha DX7 keyboards from a school. They had a cockroach problem at the school and the little buggers had infested the keyboards. Their solution? Throw the keyboards in the school's swimming pool to drown them! Now you've got dead cockroaches AND waterlogged keyboards.

Hurrah! Best thing that could happen to a DX7

[Leo_Gnardo]

Hurrah! Best thing that could happen to a DX7

Wassamatta U? Had enough listening to Phil Collins' hits of the 80's? "One More Night" nooooo..... not one more second!

DX7 got that Fender Rhodes sound just "too" perfect, without the hassle of the real thing.

[bob p]

I guess I'm an old curmudgeon -- I don't think that anything sounds like a Rhodes but a Rhodes.

[Leo_Gnardo]

Just when i thought it was safe . . . now there's a squadron of tiny spiders rapelling from the ceiling of every room in my house.

What next, baby snakes ??? Summer in the jungle of the great NorthEast. Soon come, season of mold growing in places I've never seen mold grow before. Last couple of years damp weather - not much surprises me. Occasionally there's something good. Once I thought "why's there a leaf stuck to the bottom board of my house?" Turned out to be a toad the size of the palm of my hand. Must have eaten a zillion bugs to get that big.

Black bear sighting last week @ 6 miles away. Couple of years ago bear only half a mile away, heading for the Dairy Queen. Must have wanted a tasty burger. He didn't get one. Spotted later that night raiding the grease box behind Outback.

[bob p]

i've got more wildlife in my yard than you'd believe. i think it's because all of my neighbors are fencing in their yards so that they can let their dogs run loose, and i'm the only guy left who refuses to close-up the final open patches between all of the fences. instead of mindlessly putting my dog out into a fenced in yard and abandoning him there, i accompany my dog outside and supervise him. i'd rather not fence-in the yard because it destroys the natural migration paths of the animals that belong here. the result is that all of the wild animals get diverted into my yard because it's the only open space available to them.

the other day my dog started sniffing a 'possum's butt in our back yard. he kept sniffing it so long that he nudged that possum up a hill -- along 100 feet of my neighbors fence line. i finally had to drag him away.

i've got a raccoon that makes a habit of raiding my garbage can every night for a free lunch. he never used to come here, but now that my neigbors are destroying the natural habitat the animals are being driven closer to people out of necessity. the other night i shined a light through the kitchen door to watch the raccoon in the trashcan. he responded by climbing out of the can, climbing up onto the porch and staring directly into the flashlight beam to see what I was doing. i've never seen an animal take the spotlight like that before.

my dog likes to spend the evening sitting on a hilltop, surveying his valley, like the Ralph the sheepdog in the old Warner Brothers cartoons. he'll sit there keeping watch for hours on end. he's just waiting for the opportunity to run off any critters that violate his domain. the problem is that my dog thinks he can fly. he'll leap off of a 12 foot cliff and he hits the ground running.

this morning my car was coated with hawk guano and squirrel bones.

it's always interesting around here.

[Paleo Pete]

Interesting thread...

I live out in the boonies. They don't quite have to pipe in sunshine, but I don't want to walk to town...I have squirrels running all over the yard, rabbits in my garden, tons of birds, no dogs since I hate dogs but the neighbors make up for it...I chase them out of the yard all the time. They just love to chase my cat...

I had a computer shop for several years, after a dozen computers or so I started opening them up outside. I didn't have roaches inside, and the computers usually did...I've found mouse droppings inside them, loads of spiders and roaches, dirt dobber nests...

Have had birds fly inside too, one Wren got inside a machine shop where I worked years ago and we thought he was going to kill himself on the ceiling fan...finally shooed him out.

Years ago we had some carpenter work to do, (different location) and I went out to a shed to grab a small can of nails. Came back inside without it and my mother wanted to know why. It had a wren's nest inside the can with 4 eggs. So we let her have it and bought some more nails...At the time almost every bird in the US was still on the endangered list, most still hadn't fully recovered from DDT yet. So we were very particular about preserving any bird nesting area we found. We'd wait to cut trees because of nests, ditto for unwanted bushes, let the wrens have whatever they decided to nest in and we still keep Hummingbird feeders up and I have 2 Bluebird boxes with breeding pairs using them right now.

A couple of days ago we cut down a tree, one of the limbs had a Mockingbird nest. 2 babies fell out. I was getting breakfast ready and they told me to grab my camera...we gathered up the 2 little ones and fed them worms by hand all day. I put them in a smallish wicker basket and hung it the next morning out n the front yard, when I went out there to feed them about a half hour after their 2nd feeding, the adult Mockingbirds had found them again and immediately took over the feeding. So mom has them back now and is taking good care of her little ones, feeding constantly and chasing the Blue Jays away...

[J M Fahey]

^^^^^^^^^^^Can I triple like your post?

[loudthud]

I saw an Owl near my shop. Ran in to grab my camera and caught up to him about a block away sitting on top of a rooftop AC unit. He sat up there for almost an hour. Never did see him take flight.

[NateS]

When my cat was a kitten, she crawled into my Avatar B112 through the tuning port - which on that cab was a slot that even as tiny as she was didn't look like she'd fit. After taking the cabinet apart for the third time to extract my cat, I put the cabinet up in a back room for 6 weeks. Next time she saw it, she tried every way she could turn her head, and was quite baffled why it wouldn't fit any longer.

[Enzo]

Cool. Our little building here has a couple large billboards above it. When I first came here, I saw an owl up on the top of the sign. After seeing it there a couple of times, it was pointed out to me it was a plastic owl the sign company put there to scare away other birds. Apparently kept bird poop on the signs to a minimum.

[Tom Phillips]

We have a good view out back of a big nest built by red tailed hawks. Some years the nest is used by great horned owls. I learned that great horned owls don't build their own nest. They just use whatever they can find and once they make a stand the hawks can't win a battle to evict them. No matter which species uses the nest each year it's very interesting to watch the process. Having both birds living in the area gives us good day and night rodent control. Every time I take a look through the binoculars they have their eyes locked right on my position. The attached photo shows mama owl, doing the 180º head turn, with two of her brood that are already out of the nest and a few days from taking full flight.