My shop is for the birds.

[DrGonz78]

Nothing like waking up 5 AM on a summer morning to find a big brown bat zooming around the room. And no I wasn't up all night partying with Hunter S. Thompson... maybe IT was.

No point mentioning the bats, poor bastards will be seeing them soon enough

[Justin Thomas]

I've seen the cicada killers; we've got something different - they live in fruit trees (apples, pears) they hollow it out and there's two or three inside. They have no problem going after people, and don't walk around the orchard barefoot! It was funny last summer watching my friends panic when one got in the basement; those back issues of Guitar Player did come in handy for something... Bats are cool in my book - anything that eats skeeters is okay with me! Ugly, though...

There's lots of col critters around Virginia if you look - Cow Killers, Tiger Beetles, saw a wild albino deer last night...

Justin

[DrGonz78]

I will say this about my work shop... I get Zombie Bees! They fly into the my shop at night in the summer! Zombies I call them as bees should not be flying at night. I have studied this topic as bees do not fly at night. If you have read up on Colony Collapse Disorder CCD then you know about Zombie Bees. I end up killing them as I can't stand a bee buzzing over my head or around my gear while testing voltages or soldering. One night I had one of those giant black Zombie carpenter bees come into my shop while I was working. I tell you that was hell of time killing that big ole slug!! Still I get some scorpions and black widows around my shop, but the black widows are really actually easy going!

I have cats that keep the mice out and here is favorite mouse catcher: Jade Girl!


Also, I don't kill the spiders all that much as some of them kill the ugly bugs I want out!


Edit: Check out that spider eating a cockroach!! He is missing 2 middle legs on it's right side!!

[Cygnus X1]

Carolina wrens here.
There is always one or two that want to try to build a nest in the garage.
I have a nice sized fake igauana that seems to scare them off.

But have seen some droppings I don't like.
Makes me nervous only when they land on headstocks.

[bob p]

I have a hawk that lives in an oak tree in my front yard. it tried to swoop down and snatch-up my dog several years ago when he was a 12-week old puppy. i routinely find fragments of furry meatless picked-over squirrel appendages in the yard when i mow the lawn. now all he does is eat squirrels and crap on my suburban. and i'm talking about lots of bird crap -- more bird crap than you can possibly imagine. here's one of the young that fell to the driveway when they kicked it out of the nest:

[bob p]

[Cygnus X1]

Oh that poor guy!

[Mark Hammer]

Because the folks we bought our house from used to operate a dentists-supply/repair business out of their home, I have a wonderful 16ft bench running the length of the garage, and a small office attached to it. I divide up my work between the two spots, preferring the comfort of indoors when the weather gets too cold or too hot (which pretty much covers about 7 months a year), and doing any smelly or dusty stuff in the garage, where I can air it out.

We have a free-range pet rabbit that regularly comes into the office to "inspect", although he isn't allowed into the garage. Rabbits respond to hanging wires as if these were roots coming down from the ceiling of a burrow, so I have to be careful not to leave cables dangling anywhere within reach of Bruce the Wonder Bunny. That could be printer cables, mic cables, patch cables plugged into guitars or amps, or meter leads dangling off the side of the desk. Little bugger chewed a 26-conductor Roland GK-1 cable into oblivion, and I had one helluva time splicing all those wires back together!

Since our house backs onto a schoolyard, which in turn backs onto a ravine, we tend to get mice during the winter. I've had a couple of occasions where I've had to disassemble things that had become full of mouse turds and nesting material.

In the garage, it's a different enemy, and for different reasons. A local chipmunk has decided that our garage is its timeshare condo, and sneaks in under a small crack under the garage door off in the corner, to store whatever in a small crawlspace under the garage. It regularly darts in, stares at me for a while, with its cheeks bulging, and makes a break for the corner. Last year, I was growing some cherry and plum tomatoes in planters out on the deck, and as soon as they got ripe, they'd disappear. I figured it was groundhogs or racoons or skunks, so I figured I'd be safe if I brought them into the garage and positioned them where the sun could reach them through the garage window. Little did I know that my true enemy was this little striped bugger; the tomatoes disappeared inside the garage just as easily as they'd disappeared outside!

BTW, Great bird pics, Bob!

[Sowhat]

All this wild kingdom talk reminds me of a place I worked maybe 40 years ago. I think the place was called ACE electronics and was in a depressed area of Chicago's south side. To give you a feel for how tough the neighborhood was, the service manager wore a gun and actually had been shot before and had to use it a few times since then. We did all the warranty service for the cheap junk sold by Madman Muntz in the day. Combo units (record player/AM-FM receiver) would often come in with complaints like "Unit hums when unplugged!". Those went directly to a plastic tented area out by the shipping dock. I wondered about that as I worked away on some Lear Jet 8 tracks or Akai reels to reels at my bench. One day one of the techs there grabbed one of these units out of the tent and proceeded to open it up. He had a plastic trash bag fastened to the front of his bench and when he popped the cover plate off he shook the thing and all kinds of brown stuff poured out. I took a closer look and it was a pile of dead cockroaches. The tented structure out back was a gas chamber! "hums when unplugged" took on a whole new meaning to me after seeing that.

[Steve A.]

Sowhat:

Your story might inspire some of the amp techs here to install a similar tented area outside of their shop to handle their more outrageous customers.


Steve Ahola

[Mick Bailey]

I keep 6 tins of 'Dethlac', a gallon can of CBAL agricultural insect spray, and flea powder in a rotary 'whizzer' to hand. I sometimes have to kill the livestock that comes along with an amp. Some combos can almost crawl through the door on their own.

You think I'm joking.

I went to pick up some equipment from a house and when I got home stripped off completely and left my clothes outside and got straight in the shower. The equipment and my car got fumigated.

Another time I went to a school and the admin person on the front desk said "here, take a leaflet". I asked what it was for. She said "head lice" so I replied that I didn't have head lice. "You will have when you leave here" came the reply.

[The Dude]

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.

[bob p]

... but I swear on a stack, it's absolutely true.

would that be a half-stack or a full-stack?

[The Dude]

would that be a half-stack or a full-stack?

I'm not sure it matters in this case. Regardless of the number of "cabinets" this "pool boy" had, it's quite obvious none were plugged in.

[bob p]

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



(that has to be the biggest Wall of Marshalls that I've ever seen)