taxi4ballet Posted September 21, 2014 Posted September 21, 2014 I found a grasshopper in my fridge yesterday. No idea how it got there - poor little blighter was stiff with the cold, but perked up when I put him on the grass in the garden. What's the strangest thing you've found in an unexpected place?!! 4
LinMM Posted September 26, 2014 Posted September 26, 2014 Glad that it recovered!! A few years back ......a blackbird on the top book shelf in the lounge!! We had gone out for the day and on our return found the lounge in disarray with books on the floor etc. We thought the cat had had a really mad moment (as they do) but then wondered why the cat kept staring up until we saw the poor terrified bird on the top shelf. We're still not sure how it got in other than via the cat flap and it had a stroke of luck in getting away from cat or it could have come in via a fairly small window left open. As far as we know it too survived.......as we put on garage roof and it was gone a while later. 1
Fonty Posted September 26, 2014 Posted September 26, 2014 I had a similar experience a couple of years ago. I came home to find a sparrow flying round my flat. I opened the window a bit wider, and it flew out. Much later, I was sitting watching the television, when I was startled by the sight of a fledgling sparrow hopping down the arm of the chair opposite me. It must have been hiding behind it. I opened up the top part of my sash window again, and tried to encourage it to fly out, but instead of doing that, it perched on the frame, and then somehow managed to slide down between the two windows, so that it was trapped. After a fruitless half an hour trying to get it to perch on a pencil so that I could hook it out, I eventually gave up and phoned the RSPCA. A rather terse individual arrived eventually, got it out, planked it in a cage, and left, implying that I had signed the poor thing's death warrant and I should not have interfered. I was terribly upset by the whole thing, but what I was supposed to do beats me. I could hardly leave it trapped in the window all night, shrieking its head off. The worst thing was that the adult bird kept coming back over the next 3 or 4 days, calling for its child. 2
LinMM Posted September 26, 2014 Posted September 26, 2014 These things are always difficult. Poor mother sparrow! But what can you do in these circumstances. Luckily where we live there is a sort of locally recognised "wildlife expert" .......who ran a pet shop for years.....and you can rely on him to help birds/foxes/badgers/ducks and so on and then return to the wild as near as appropriate to where found. I would always ring him rather than RSPCA as I'm not sure how many rules the latter are hampered by. We've seen an injured magpie back in our garden .......at least we're 99percent sure as the poor thing lost an eye and got a twisted leg(now normal) due to cat attack. I couldn't believe how perky he was two weeks later when I went to visit!! When living in Islington I saw a few strange weirdo things. A fox on a lead a few times in Upper street and once a ferret on a lead.
Fonty Posted September 26, 2014 Posted September 26, 2014 I would have loved to have contacted a wild life expert, but I was living in Archway in London at the time, and didn't know any!
LinMM Posted September 27, 2014 Posted September 27, 2014 I'm still thinking about that grasshopper though! How did it get in the fridge?!! 1
taxi4ballet Posted September 27, 2014 Author Posted September 27, 2014 I'm still thinking about that grasshopper though! How did it get in the fridge?!! I have absolutely no idea We hadn't bought any veg or lettuce or anything like that, and we don't have our milk delivered, so it couldn't have been clinging to a milk bottle unnoticed either. Total mystery. Thinking about such odd things - my late mum once found a moth sitting on a bar of soap on the kitchen draining board. It was a really pretty thing, so she left it there. On her return the moth was gone, but it had laid a pile of eggs on the soap, all neatly set out in rows... 1
Jan McNulty Posted September 27, 2014 Posted September 27, 2014 Snake in the kitchen. EEEEKKKKKK! How do you remove a snake from your kitchen?
Anjuli_Bai Posted September 27, 2014 Posted September 27, 2014 I've given up trying to figure out how "things" get into the house. For instance...... One time when I was the only one in the house all day - I was walking into and out of rooms straightening up and so forth....when walking down the hall I had been up and down all day, I see lying on the floor in the middle of the hall .....a ten inch twig from a tree, some leaves attached. Didn't match any of our garden trees. I hadn't been outside, so it couldn't have caught onto the hem of my skirt....I don't have a dog..... When my husband retired and was home all day he had a similar experience. After telling me about it, he was rather surprised to find I didn't think it strange at all. I told him that I long ago stopped trying to apply reason to these events.
Melody Posted September 28, 2014 Posted September 28, 2014 (edited) EEEEKKKKKK! How do you remove a snake from your kitchen? Yelled loudly for my husband. We have one of those long-handled picker-up thingies (which we normally use to position some of the decorations on our tallest Christmas trees without having to climb ladders and whatnot), and he used it to grab the snake round the middle and held it at arms length while walking it out of the door. Fortunately the front end of the snake was shorter than the tool because my husband said it was coiling and striking the whole time he was evicting it. It was an immature rat snake, which is just as well because the full-size ones are several feet long (we had a close-ish encounter with one of them in the garden - apparently it lived under the air-conditioning unit). If I'd been there on my own, I think I might have just moved out... Edited September 28, 2014 by Melody 1
Fonty Posted September 28, 2014 Posted September 28, 2014 Snake in the kitchen. I really don't like snakes! Was it venomous? Or was it a nice, friendly sort of snake? 1
Anjuli_Bai Posted September 28, 2014 Posted September 28, 2014 How does one tell if a snake is happy? It wags it's tail. 2
Anjuli_Bai Posted September 28, 2014 Posted September 28, 2014 ...unless, of course, it is a rattlesnake. 2
Melody Posted September 29, 2014 Posted September 29, 2014 (edited) I really don't like snakes! Was it venomous? Or was it a nice, friendly sort of snake? It was a rat snake, so not venomous. Not remotely friendly, though. At least when they're outside they're supposed to eat rats and mice and whatnot, so they're useful. As long as they stay well out of sight, that is. The problem is that you don't know what you're dealing with half the time. Bright green snakes are fairly common around here (we've had a couple of encounters in the garden) and they're supposed to be harmless. But then we get these warnings about not taking anything for granted because people with exotic pets sometimes abandon them or they escape, and then you might have green mambas running around, and they're very dangerous. Same with some of the other common snakes - they also have venomous counterparts. I remember some expert saying - apparently seriously - that the best way to tell the difference in one case is to check the colour of the underside. So basically you have a snake that might be deadly and you're supposed to flip it over to see what colour the belly is. Personally I think running away is by far the better option. Definitely a good reason to seriously think about moving to Ireland. Edited September 29, 2014 by Melody 1
Jan McNulty Posted September 29, 2014 Posted September 29, 2014 Some years ago when I was a novice car owner I noticed that one of my tyres had a nail in it. As I was about to set off on a journey I sought advice from a neighbour who insisted on changing the wheel for me. When we got the wheel out of the well there was an empty miniature whisky bottle! As I had never even raised the mat in the boot before and I had had the car since new I had absolutely no idea how the bottle got in there! 1
Melody Posted September 30, 2014 Posted September 30, 2014 Apparently the wheels had been put on by a mechanic partial to the occasional wee nip at work. 1
taxi4ballet Posted September 30, 2014 Author Posted September 30, 2014 I still remember a rhyme we heard once on a kids' tv programme about how to tell whether a snake with stripes is a dodgy one or not: "Red and black venom lack... red and yellow kill a fellow" Not sure I'd risk it though! 3
Jacqueline Posted October 3, 2014 Posted October 3, 2014 I have been following the progress of a massive spider that took up residence in my hazel shrub. It wove the most intricate and beautiful webs all over the twiggy bits and could stay still for ages, then move like lightning. I don't know what sort it was but it had lovely markings. This morning it has gone, leaving no trace. Maybe it has been eaten by something higher up the food chain. Or maybe it just got sick of me watching it and decided to move somewhere more private. 2
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