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THOSE PEOPLE ARE IDIOTS!!
YOU SHOULD CLEAN YOUR FINS EVERY 12 MONTHS!!! NOT EVERY YEAR!!!!




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Still doesn't work when your pet mice build a bed inside the engine covers since the last time you mowed. I even had customer that didn't mow for two weeks and she cooked the young ones and the engine.

A serving of BBQ mouse anyone?

StarTech said:

Still doesn't work when your pet mice build a bed inside the engine covers since the last time you mowed. I even had customer that didn't mow for two weeks and she cooked the young ones and the engine.

A serving of BBQ mouse anyone?

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Do they come with sides and a drink?

I reckon I could come up with sweet and sour coleslaw with some 20+ proof Muscadine wine.

I like how you guys roll LOL.

slomo

This is where a little bit of Sherlock Holmes enters mower repair.
You have a look at where the mower lives.
Had a customer who kept their mower in the same shed as the chicken food , horse food & bedding hay
Every time I came the mower was stuffed with mice
Solution was to park it outside in the breezeway where it gets a colder overnight.
Eventually they took the advice & housed a pair of homeless cats in the shed , no more mouse problem.
Amazed how many ex-city horse owners do not realize that mice can kill horses .

I buy 1# candy bars (water proof posion bars by TomCat) for my pet mice and rats. I keep one out all the time under my floor.

Not fond of rat & mouse baits.
They often end up in the belly of whatever usually eats rats & mice so kills off their natural preditors thus makes the problem worse.
OK for inner city blocks where few owls, eagles snakes etc live but a dissaster in outer urban / semi rural blocks .

That is why they made it nearly like regular food around here. One brand I brought they eat 10# pounds and just got fat on it.

The type I use usually kills then after they are back in their dens. Besides most predators don't survive me if they attacking my chickens. I try my best to trap the smaller ones for relocating 30-40 miles away but some just has to killed. Sorry but I can't lose several chickens every night otherwise. I had one mink to 11 one and and then a week later another 11. I finally caught the sucker and put a couple .22 through his skull and sold his hide.

What I hated to kill was that Blonde Fox that just kept killing my geese. Sorta had kill her anyway as she so beaten up by my two Emus. They done had broken her back.

I rebuilt my chicken coop a few years ago to coon proof it... Worked good for about 1 month... I had made a separate cage for their nests/roost in the inside, best i can tell is the coons got into the main coop, and reached through the chicken wire on the nest boxes and strangled them. Just strangled them.

I stuff small chicken wire around the Fan shroud so they cannot get in.

If you guys liked that one you're gonna love this.


Neglected for over ten years. The mouse urine dissolved the cooling fins on cylinder head #1 and froze nearly every bolt exposed to it.




After a few weeks of cleaning and wrenching:

Oh, yeah; mouse urine is highly caustic. You ought to see the fireworks when they've peed all over the armature of a 75hp, 440V, 3-phase well motor. It's spectacular, frightening, and expensive (had to replace and adapt a new motor to the old well).

Once per year isn't always enough.

yeah, the best way to keep mice away, do like i do... i keep a cat under the blower housing.... i only heard him complain once.

Yuck
Worst one I ever had the nesting material was mostly cloth which was getting jambed between the starter pinion & the flywheel teeth locking the starter
The owner had burned out the starter motor after burning up a battery before he called me in .

cpurvis said:

Once per year isn't always enough.

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True dat.

Early spring when you scalp the yard, might want to check the fins after mowing.

slomo

EatPreyMow said:

After a few weeks of cleaning and wrenching:

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WOW, great job - of replacing everything. Looking good now. Even that spark plug insulator was yellow LOL.

slomo

Maybe I could start using rat urine to clean aluminium transfer instead of acid ??

Scrubcadet10 said:

Maybe I could start using rat urine to clean aluminium transfer instead of acid ??

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You will need more rats than there are on Capitol Hill for that and rats don't pee all that much .
OTOH we got about 200,000,000,000 excess mice right now if you want some .

bertsmobile1 said:

You will need more rats than there are on Capitol Hill for that and rats don't pee all that much .
OTOH we got about 200,000,000,000 excess mice right now if you want some .

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Darn, i wanted 300,000,000,000.....

Scrub be careful what you ask for as Bert can ship them and by the time they get here there cam be 8x as many.. I took out a field rat several yrs ago that had 8 little ones inside her. MY chickens ate them like pop corn.

Got a riding buddy at Dubbo who uses a modified drain cleaning vacuum to clear them out of his winter feed silos
I think he said it is 5,000 gallons and he fills it between 2 & 5 times a night .
All of the feed that was not eaten is contaminated beyond use .
And yes, 2 to 6 pups event 14 days that are ready to reproduce in 21 .
City folks just don't understand how fast the numbers can multiply.
They have already eaten almost the entire winter crops and will probably eat the entire coming summer one as well before they get on top of them.

bertsmobile1 said:

Got a riding buddy at Dubbo who uses a modified drain cleaning vacuum to clear them out of his winter feed silos
I think he said it is 5,000 gallons and he fills it between 2 & 5 times a night .
All of the feed that was not eaten is contaminated beyond use .
And yes, 2 to 6 pups event 14 days that are ready to reproduce in 21 .
City folks just don't understand how fast the numbers can multiply.
They have already eaten almost the entire winter crops and will probably eat the entire coming summer one as well before they get on top of them.

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Agree you guys have rodent issues. My thought was this is a KNOWN issue. Why isn't the food source stored in a more protected manner? Rat terriers, water moat filled with snakes, ferrets and so on can help. Those little minks are cool.

slomo

Mice can swim
A big carpet snake, say 12' will eat 4 mice once a week.
IT was forseeable
West of the hill has been in drought for 4 to 11 years depending upon the actual place.
Thus nearly all of the natural preditors were in short supply.
Then we had the bushfires which killed around 1/3 of all of the birds so no birds that feed on mice
Then there was flood so lush vegitation & the first species to recover are the imported mice , the native species breed a lot slower .
Usually with a flood / drought cycle it would take 2 to3 seasons for mouse numbers to stabilize
However the fires cooked a massive number of snakes , dingoes and other small carnivores as well as burning down the nesting sites for owls, hawkes, eagles & other birds that eat mice.
Then there is the problem of what to do with the dead mice.
Mark ends up with a pile around 10' wide 8' high & 20 ' long most nights
These have to be burned or they become breeding places for blow flies.
Excessive blow flies lay eggs in the dags hanging off the sheeps bums and the maggots then crawl into the sheep and eat it alive from the inside out.
Not a pretty sight and can knock your breeding flock down to nothing in no time flat.
They do the same to the vulvas of ewes after they give birth so you loose the mother and of cause the lambs then starve because mum is dead

Yes it is people don't understand how nature can be so imbalance by things. This climate change is really screwing things up.

There are folks that don't understand why I had to kill one my pet roosters after something attack my chickens by getting into my coop. But I didn't find him until the next morning where half of his skin was gnawed off. Being hot weather here flies had already flyblown him. I was surprised he was even still alive. It hurt me to do it but it was necessary to prevent him from suffering. I have been through this enough times to know what will happen even with meds available. What it was that attack him is still to be determined but I did wrapped most the building with 1/4" hardware cloth.

Currently a neighbor has loaned me his field camera to find out what it is. So far only one possum has triggered it but I did also trapped a raccoon. It will take a few days for things get back to coming around as my present goes away. Whatever it is did major damage to the building to get in.

For some reason the sun seems to be extra hot this year too. Temperatures are not that bad yet. I think it is just the UV that is giving me such problems.

And invasive species are a problem everywhere. Here even some plants are invasive like our Bradford pear trees and the Japanese Privet brushes. They are everywhere in places you don't even want them to be.

I bet that racoon was your culprit...ive got rid of most of them from the property, but i leave the possums as they eat deer ticks and the Lonestar tick... My dad got bit by one years ago, he couldn't eat red meat for months.

Scrubcadet10 said:

I bet that racoon was your culprit...ive got rid of most of them from the property, but i leave the possums as they eat deer ticks and the Lonestar tick... My dad got bit by one years ago, he couldn't eat red meat for months.

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Yelp I think it is a raccoon too as one showed 2:30 this morning per camera images but I don't it the same one. Plus he is a lot fatter. He hung around for about 15 minutes checking things out. Time to set him up tonight. But possums are a chicken eater too. I have killed several over the years for attacking my chickens. The coon is a new problem but resolvable now that I know I got one messing around. I reckon I can return the favor of him eating my chickens by eating him but I not that into meats lately.

Thanks to Covid my diet has changed a lot. Beside my teeth just won't work on beef enough more; unless, take extra steps to get it tender.

The folks around me with chickens lose a lot of them to owls, hawks and coyotes. The deer hunters have taken care of a lot of the coyote but we still hear them occasionally at night. Last year the raccoons about wiped out the sweet corn. I shot 4 in my yard last year. They were out in middle of the day acting weird. Time to go! Anybody else got the Honeysuckle invasion? We call it the Kudzu of the north

No, but I trade some poison ivy. Honeysuckle I can deal with, poison ivy I can't. Although the spray works wonders on it.

Hawks can be a problem but I taken out most them here but only certain ones that do the dirty work. Owls are not a problem as I keep chickens fasten up at night. I havent seen coyotes but do hear a lot foxes and even took one out.

Pramitol and glysophate salt has taken care of the poison ivy. Tordon on the Honeysuckle. Better landscaping through chemistry.

One night the dogs were barking at around 2 AM, I shined the spotlight down at the pond about 100 yards away, and sure enough i see the orangeish glow of fox eyes, i went back inside, grabbed my Mossberg 88 which i keep Federal premium #2 buck in. And a red predator light on it. I walk to to the pond and about 50 yards before i got to it i started shining that red light, it hit the fox in the eyes so i kept it on him, while he was looking at me.. I got to about 15 yards and that fox never moved and i blasted him. I guess the red light was disorienting to him or something..