Our house seems to get quite a variety of critters in it. This is probably partly because it’s a very old house, and because we’re sort of surrounded by woods.

Some of the encounters we’ve had (some fun, some not so fun):

  • We had a hornet’s nest in one of the windows, and sprayed it, knocking the nest down and getting rid of it after the hornets had all died. Despite this, we still regularly have a hornet or two show up inside the house. Fortunately, they seem to mainly fly around the windows, trying to get back outside, rather than attacking us.
  • We get the usual moths and other bugs at night, many of which get eaten by the cats. One night, though, a large, noisy flying bug was being pursued by the cats, and it turned out, on closer examination, to be a cockroach. Flying cockroaches = very bad where Sean is concerned. I mashed it furiously, and there have luckily been no more.(Update: We saw another of these flying bugs outside one of the windows, and the consensus now is that it was some kind of beetle, and not actually a roach.)
  • One morning I came downstairs and saw and heard something dart across the kitchen floor. As I walked into the kitchen, it darted back the other way, and I saw that it was a chipmunk. It darted through a gap between a cabinet and the floor, and was seen no more. It probably decided that it didn’t want to return to the land of much larger animals.
  • There are bats living in our attic. We actually welcome them, because they’ll keep the mosquito population down. They have not come into the rest of the house, which is just how we like it.
  • I discovered a mouse in the ceiling of one room. They’re not welcome, but this just happened the other day, so we have yet to deal with it.
  • Related to the above, on the day after seeing the mouse, I found a strange object on the floor of the same room. It turned out to be a mouse skull! Apparently, mice not only live in the ceiling, but have died there as well…
  • Finally, just last night, I walked into the bathroom to discover a toad sitting on the bathtub. No idea how it got in. I grabbed a box and gave it a ride outside.

Stay tuned for the next exciting episode of Mutual of Belchertown’s Wild Kingdom!