How to deal with pesky woodpeckers

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Ever hear a tap-tapping on your house, while you are having breakfast or working at your desk?  It's hard to tell where it's coming from.  You run outside, and there's a woodpecker on the side of your house.

For 5 years, I've had woodpecker holes in the cedar siding of my house, and it's getting worse.  Some of my neighbors report their own woodpecker blues.

Here's how I solved the problem...

First, filling the holes.  For deep ones, I used polyurethane foam to fill most of the hole, then finished the outside with a epoxy-based wood filler.  Sand, then paint.

Pollinators in the news

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Pollinators and flowers are one of the best examples of interdependence.  They show why preserving biodiversity is important.  

Flecked with gold... a fly with hairs for catching pollen, in Hartman Creek State Park, WI

How do you know it's a fly?  Just one pair of wings... bees have two pairs.

Do tigers eat people?

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Definitely, they do.

Generally, it's thought that only tigers that can't catch their ordinary prey turn to eating people.  An injured or disabled tiger turns into a man-eater.

Recently in Indonesia, several Sumatran tigers treed 5 people for three days, after they accidentally caught a tiger cub in a trap.  A sixth man was killed by the tigers.  The trapping suggests that these tigers were defending their cub.  Source

Rat bites--how dangerous are they?

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Recently I was reading Katherine Boo's nonfiction book--Behind the Beautiful Forevers--about life in the slums of India.  It's a deeply disturbing account of the lives, hopes, and misfortunes of people living in abject poverty.

There were numerous accounts of children bitten by rats, including one boy with numerous infected rat bites on his butt.  It was horrifying.  But I wondered if it could really be true.  So I began an internet search.

Dog survives 110-mile ride under the hood of a pickup truck

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This blog started when my neighbor asserted that rats sometimes lived in cars.  I didn't believe him.  I thought, "Maybe YOUR car."

But he was right.  Since then, I've documented cats, rats, mice, squirrels, groundhogs, snakes, raccoons... and now a dog... hitchhiking under the hood of cars.

by Jaime Magana

Mice on airliners

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I've seen a number of reports about rats on airliners, usually foreign airlines (Pakistan was one).  But mice are almost anywhere, so I wasn't surprised to come across the post below:


This is a report about "mice LIVING on many of the aircraft of one of the largest US major US airlines, whose aircraft we used to fly on the "interchange" program that used to exist before deregulation.*"

Can you name these wetland animals?

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Take the skull challenge...

Can you name the wetland animal that matches each skull?

The relative sizes are shown.  The largest is 7 3/4" long, and the smallest is 2 3/8" long.

A. hint:  omnivore (eats a wide variety of animals and plants)