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I have a small family of harmless house spiders in my pantry. However, they don’t seem to venture out beyond their selected spot, so I have declared a truce.
We have many spider ‘roommates’ in our house that we co-exist with. Occasionally we’ll get a big grass or wolf spider though and I’ll move them either outside or if it’s cold outside, into the heated garage, as I don’t have the heart to put them out into the cold to die.
I really don’t like spiders, but I’d rather have a truce than hose down the pantry with insecticide.
We live in a rancher on a slab, so no basement for the invaders to gather. We’ve had mice in the walls (occasionally one will still get in and die somewhere), ants, BIG wolf/fishing spiders, the little black spiders, the wandering beetle that came in through a gap in the door, invasive brown marmomated stinkbugs, spotted lanternflies, etc etc etc. it’s a constant battle
the most recent attack was honestly the hardest to deal with, springtails. Theyre the size of a vanilla bean seed, and they got into our shower. its taken two months of a dehumidier in the bathroom, diatomaceous earth, vinegar, and aggressive drying of the shower post-shower to end them, but we have emerged victorious.
Also, @David, don’t buy those little trap things for the terro, just get the liquid in the bottle, it works just as well, is easier to put into small spaces, and is so so so much cheaper.
My infestations are numerous. I recently moved out to 10 acres half wooded half meadow. As you can imagine nature seems determined to take back the spaces that are now my workshop and house. I had mice in the house but a combo of snap traps and my fiancé’s house cat seems to have taken care of that problem. The shop is invaded by various rodents including but not necessarily limited to mice and chipmunks. I have set traps but fear I am not making much progress in this war. I am thinking I may have to recruit a couple of generals (barn cats) to help me win the war against the rodents and reclaim the barn. Among other pests are ants and ticks which I do have plans to remedy but they are outside so not a top priority right now.
One winter I had a 40 pound bag of bird food sitting in my garden shed. One day I noticed some mouse action but I ignored it. At some point, I realized it was a full on infestation. I could watch them come and go through a tiny gap at the bottom of the door. I removed the food, but it was too late. They decided to eat the grass seed. I dumped that in the yard. There was no food left, but they refused to move out. Eventually I trapped about 20 of them and cleaned the shed from top to bottom and that has taken care of most of the problem, though I still see some turds in there from time to time.
Whenever it’s really wet outside, the roaches tend to invade. Roaches and Atari 2600 games kind of overrun my house.
My brother-in-law on the Island of Maui is currently trying to re-home the wild chickens that keep coming around the house. Not sure he’s having any measurable amount of success as more keep showing up.
If he gets rid of the wild chickens, he’d best be prepared for the centipede invasion.
I’d rather have the chickens.
We had neighbors who lived on the big island in the ‘50s and told horror stories about those venomous centipedes running out of closets and delivering a nasty bite. As for the chickens… they’re probably a lot tastier than centipedes. Cull in moderation, and use an appropriate marinade.
I find myself in the middle of an infestation of hoi polloi whenever I leave the house.
Any luck with your Rodius infestation?
Significant progress has been made.
We adopted a pair of kittens when the kiddos, 2 years apart, were little. The cats grew up thinking they were another pair of children. But when a mouse ventures into the house the savage beast is awakened.
One morning the anxious cat was even more insistent than usual that I get up and follow her to the living room. The other cat was seated with its paw poised over a bloodied and beaten rodent. Every time the mouse twitched the cat would deliver another firm blow.
The anxious cat informed me that my duty was to catch the stunned mouse with a glass, take it outside, provide a proper burial, and then return to provide abundant treats and praise for the rest of the day. The other cat yawned ‘whatever’ and returned to one of her 24 napping places.
Cats. Nature’s perfect killing machine evolving over millions of years to perform one function really well.
We had mice for YEARS in our old house. Poisons, traps, sealing the outside walls….nothing worked. I proposed a couple of rat snakes, but my wife felt that the mice were easier to live with than a snake roaming freely. Luckily, no mice managed to hitch a ride to the new place.
Ugh – Ants.
When we lived in central CA, we had no end of ants infusing our kitchen – and black widows in the garage and out on the patio.
And whose job was it to get rid of them?
Teenaged me.
Which somewhat explains by continued obsession with putting pantry items in clamp-top glass jars.
And garden gloves.
Your mouse story sounds familiar.
When we were on a family trip in Northern Europe – my Dad chose a dump of a place in Amsterdam on Damrac near the RLD for us to stay. They had a restaurant on the ground floor and rooms above. On the last morning there, my bestie went down to get me some breakfast from the buffet. As he described it – while he was selecting various meats and cheeses for me, a rat climbed down the wall on the plastic faux-greenery onto the buffet table… and they both put their paws/tongs on the same piece of cheese. After a bit of a staredown, my bestie let the rat have his choice and allowed him to retreat to his rat enclave.
Those Dutch rats are tough.
“Which somewhat explains by continued obsession with putting pantry items in clamp-top glass jars.”
Glass jars are good. I like to vacuum seal perishable pantry items for longer term storage since the thicker plastic of vacuum bags not only keeps out pests but air as well so the items stay fresher for much longer. Which is nice when I get a craving for biscuits and find my now-unobtanium-around-here White Lily self rising flour is still as fresh as the day I bought it 6 years ago.
Black widows are no joke in the Central Valley… omnipresent and dangerous. As a kid, they infested our backyard, and as a young adult I had a place on the edge of town where they easily found their way inside. When reaching into rarely-used spaces, I was always sensitive to the distinct feel of their strong webs as a sign of their presence.
Few bug sprays faze them before they can get away, but a number of us Autopians probably have their kryptonite on hand: carburetor cleaner. Just a spritz of that stuff drops ’em dead. Is it more toxic than Raid? Mayyyybe. I’m no chemist, but I can say carb cleaner is useful for more than one thing.
That rural apartment had another infestation: sun spiders, which are apparently more like scorpions, a smaller version of the huge camel spiders that went viral during Gulf War II. They’re not venomous but definitely have a commanding presence. If you’ve never seen them, imagine a small, greasy-yellow (yet fuzzy) tarantula-looking thing raising its forelegs in a warning and then gaping all four of its large toothy jaws at you, Predator-style. Harmless, but nightmare fuel nonetheless.
Our neighborhood under the bluffs in La Crosse, WI had a rabbit infestation. They ate the vegetables. They ate the flowers. They reproduced like, well, bunnies. They were everywhere.
I caught a couple and released them outside of town; didn’t make a dent.
Then the hawks and eagles living in the bluffs noticed the new food source. I walked into my yard one morning to find half a disemboweled rabbit in the grass. The rabbit problem went away quickly.
Have you tried owls? Owl boxes are all the rage out here.
The hawks did the job, and we didn’t see hide nor hare for the next couple years. (Ha!) We’ve moved since then, so I don’t know where the circle of life in La Crosse now.
The worst infestion we’ve had are yellow jackets, one summer we went up into our attic (which is a walk up, very large one we use for storage) to find a solid thousand or so of them hanging out. We straight up noped, and called a pest control place for that one. They killed them all, but the nest was never recovered, as it more than likely was in an inaccessible void in my daughter’s bedroom wall. Freaky.
I won’t hurt a living being, but I make an exception for ants. My old place (the entire town) was like a freaking year-round ant convention. Those bastards were everywhere. Drop a crumb in the kitchen? An hour later you’d have thousands of those sneaky little industrious motherfuckers lining up from outside all the way into the kitchen trying to get in on the hot crumb action.
Upstairs, downstairs, outside wall, inside wall, didn’t matter, they always came in, with thousands and thousands of their little friends. We had to have ziploc bags everywhere to hide away anything that may be of interest to an ant. Sometimes they’d just come in for no apparent reason, making a giant trail of wiggly blackness from god knows where to god knows where.
I killed so many of them, yet they always came back. Terro traps, spraying outside, diligently putting food away, none of that was ever enough.
I hate them.
My wife and I are the same! We try not to kill/hurt anything except ants and fruit flies which are EVERYWHERE from spring-fall. I’m convinced there is a giant ant mound underneath my entire property. I killed a huge colony in my shed a couple years ago and after spraying them all, I had to scoop them up with a shovel there was so many.
Redneck caviar!
While vacuuming the office I noticed a small critter. I edged up to it, without pointing the sucker directly at it. Saw it move to realize we have a very young lizard in here. Plenty of hidey holes to keep away from us, but unlikely to be enough consummables to survive long. Any ideas on how to trap it?
Grab it with your hands or put some Tupperware over it. Then escort it outside.
And be prepared to end up holding nothing but the detached tail, depending on species. We have lizards around the office and they occasionally get in the building so we just trap them in a cup and take them outside. They’re technically an invasive species here, but they eat mosquitos so I welcome them with open arms.
Play The Doors. It will emerge to ask for a doobie.
Great timing on this article. We are in LA suburbs near that charming wildlife crossing on the 101. This morning I thought “damn, that’s a big spider with unusual markings right outside our back door.”
Google tells me it’s a western black widow so I called the pest control company. I mentioned the ants that aren’t bothered at all by the humane traps and they said “it’s hot so there’s not much we can do. They’re just thirsty and looking for water.”
The poisonous spiders, though. Those are hopefully going away.
Some articles are TMI, this is one of them.
It took about six months of living on the edge of farm country for me, a certified suburb liver, to go from “don’t kill if avoidable” to “there is no morality in war” when it comes to household pests. Maybe they’re manageable elsewhere, here if you give them an inch they’ll take a mile.
I draw the line at killing black snakes if avoidable, since they eat rodents. But if my wife sees one . . . Well, there’s no coming back from that.
Yeah I am on 20 acres and mostly around larger properties and farms and some suburbs. We did live traps a little while for the mice but it just to a point they just kept coming back and it seemed like there was more each time. We have gotten to the point of using kill traps in the house and well our barns has cats so good luck mice, voles and chipmunks. Onn the other hand spiders in the house I try to put outside as I really do not see them a pest but the other half she hates them (even though we have a tarantula)
Jason’s computers are too old to have mice.
I’m willing to bet his “infestation” was Otto’s friend group, from what we’ve seen of his place it has “let’s make this the house we all hang out at” all over it.
At least until word got out among the neighborhood moms about the batteries and the chainsaw.
My closet has a keyboard infestation. It’s just as bad.
I work to re-home them, but new ones move in. Maybe we should try those WASD sprays.
aka RAID in dvorak layout.
We had flying squirrels and tons of spiders when we moved in (place had been unoccupied for a while, though they had a cleaner show up once a week or so). I didn’t even know flying squirrels lived around here. Exterminators put in 1-way doors where the squirrels had been getting in, which worked. I like that it could be resolved without killing. Spiders were a combo of vacuum and exterminator and they’ve been fine since. Ants once a year, but Home Defense spray around entrances does a pretty good job of keeping them out. Mice. There are few animals I hate, but mice are on that list. Every year, they get into the attic space above my bed. Nobody can figure how they’re getting in even though you can hear which external wall cavity they use. Even caulking up the entire seam behind the shingles didn’t stop them from coming back. Middle of the night, their scratching wakes me and I feel like I’m in some ancient tomb and they’re going to fall through the ceiling on me like an Indiana Jones movie. Anyway, I tried a bunch of traps, and the Dizzy Dunker bucket trap is the best. It’s like a paddle wheel version of a rolling log with a funnel that directs them in such a way that they don’t get spooked and withdraw when they start to step on the flaps. It resets itself, bait lasts quite a while, and it can be live or kill. I set it up outside where they seem to get in when the weather starts to turn colder. I’ve gotten over 50 of them. Left it for a week once and found 11 floating in there with different rates of decomp. I imagine it was like the Hell of the Upside Down Sinners for the last few of them. I almost felt bad, but the foul things are necrophiliacs and they invaded my favorite car. The bodies disappear within hours of dumping in the woods, feeding skunks, opossums, raccoons, hawks, owls, coyotes, and great blue herons (That last one is a maybe. I’ve seen them hunt chipmunks and they’re one of the few around during the day to eat the dead ones.).
I actually felt bad about killing some yellow jackets of all things. One of the AC units’ pipe seals had deteriorated, leaving an access hole they used to make a nest in the wall of the garage where you could hear them chewing away at the wood, plus they’re near the patio and grille. I got a bee suit and some pro-grade insecticide dust to puff into the hole. There was a constant 3-4 coming and going at a time and they were never aggressive to me at all. No activity when I checked a few hours later. Being so chill, if they weren’t where they were and causing damage, I’d have left them alone.
My current house that we are selling soon gets so many nice during the winter. If they didn’t piss and shit everywhere I wouldn’t really mind them, but they make such disgusting messes everywhere they get to. Our old cat was a big help until she died a few years ago. We have since adopted two more cats and they have zero kills between them.
I dealt with the mosquitos and June bugs that used to swarm the yard at night with the best bug killer you can get- bats. It took a few years to get established, but we have a decent colony of little brown bats that live in a bat box I put on the garage. I hope whoever buys this house doesn’t try to get rid of them.
I believe you inadvertently recreated the medieval practice of putting the heads of one’s adversaries on pikes outside the gates. To paraphrase a film character, “THIS is what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps!!”
I AM an Autopian member, but I can never read these. Advice?
I am also encountering this problem – no member badge showing either?
Send an email to Matt or one of the others. I’m sure they will help.
FIVE?! oof.
Do they get some awesome bunk beds?
I was really expecting it to be Adam Ants at Adrian’s place.
I expect Adrian will stand and deliver, because he’s no goody two shoes. He doesn’t want cartrouble.
Bats, Pipistrelle Bats, Horseshoe Bats and maybe others, they form maternity roosts from June to about now. Just females and babies. In the odd spaces between the roofs, I can no longer hear them, my ears are old now, but they rustle audibly sometimes. There are lots of spiders, but it is September, the meesses are polite, they are outdoor mice, thankfully the infestation of grandchildren was short lived. they have better things to do, none of which involve bats, or spiders, or mices.