Well, that didn't take long

[johnridley]

I was topping off windshield washer fluid in all the cars this morning, and as I was opening it, I realized we'd had the new car what, 3 or 4 months, and I had never opened the hood before. Geez, take away my geek license.
Here's what was under the hood. This is pretty common in our garage. This is also one of the reasons we don't have an attached garage. It gives these guys all winter to camp out in the garage while they eat through the wall into the attic and invade.
A couple of handfuls of stuff moved to the trash can (the cat is sniffing my hand like crazy right now) and a hit with the shop vac takes care of that. Of course, they probably robbed the firewall to make the nest.

Comments

[renniekins.livejournal.com]

What IS that? I totally can't tell from the pic.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Sorry. Mouse nest. We have a lot of field mice in the neighborhood. They don't come in to the house, but there are hundreds on the property. They invariably decide that cars are nice places to live, first time one comes in that's nice and clean and warm. Then you drive away with them in it, and they have an unpleasant experience. I unpleasanted the one that probably built this about a week ago with this car, into an unpleasant furry pancake in the driveway.

[isherempress.livejournal.com]

Eeew. Yucko-ptui. I enjoy the attached garage, and yes, we are still catching ~1-2 mice each month in the attic or basement... and yes, that's a drag.

OTOH, I'm pretty sure my car doesn't have a mouse nest under the hood. Yours is mighty impressive, though. ;-)

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Oh, I don't mind the mice at all. I don't want them in the house but outside I quite like them. They're fun to watch run around when I'm mowing. They camp out in the bluebird houses in the wintertime. Come about March I'll go out and evict them; when I open the houses up to clean them out, most often each will have a half dozen or so field mice looking up at me. I just flip the thing over and they scatter. Once in a while one will have a good grip on something and I'll have to encourage him to leave.

They're pretty cute but the houses are for the bluebirds.

We had a red tailed hawk move in about 6 years ago which almost cleaned out the snakes and mice from the property, but both have recovered pretty well lately. We still see hawks in our back yard occasionally, but they're just passing through and generally just take a sparrow or a dove.

I want to put in a new, larger pond that's big enough to host fish, but we have cranes that come by most evenings in the summer, and I'm not sure if they'll eat the fish. One way to find out I suppose.

[jennlk]

For some reason, they only nest in the new cars. I don't remember ever having two nests in the same car. Well, other than the year that some birdseed got left in the van overnight -- we didn't see a nest anywhere, but we're still finding birdseed in the oddest places....

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

I suspect they don't like the oil and such all over an older engine. The new car is all shiny new and clean.

[qnofhrt.livejournal.com]

We had mice living in the shed out back. I foolishly left a partial bag of bird food out there and they thought that was just dandy. They also liked the open bag of cow manure I had in there for a while. When I went to use up the rest of it last spring, I stuck my hand in for a big chunk and something wiggled under my fingers. Bag and mice went flying - it was a momma mouse with 6 youngins still attached. I know I shreaked because the neighbor came out to see what was wrong. I don't mind mice but it was NOT what I was expecting!

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Yeah, we've had that problem with bird seed. It all gets packed immediately into sealed plastic containers now. You might think they'd chew through it, but it hasn't happened so far.