Post Race!

@robdog - old, yes - but so proud of my boys I am! One just got a summer job as a life guard.

@shaggy - ticks are over the top the past few years. And the cicadas have all gone off cycle and appear pretty much at any time. So now we have 3 inch long cicadas killer wasps (who don't sting thank God!). And wildlife is really increasing - beaver, river otter, bobcats, fisher cats, coyote, black bear - all in a nearly coastal CT town between Bridgeport and New Haven. When I moved to CT from NYC almost 50 years ago we had nothing like this for wildlife!

I remember hiking the AT through CT during a cicada cycle. I was staying up late to watch a lunar eclipse...which was the last time I ever did that, because they aren't all that spectacular. I wasn't sure if I'd be able to get to sleep due to the deafening roar of the cicadas. I did manage to track one down, though. Interesting looking insects.

Coyotes have made it....everywhere. They're an animal that will live in town alongside people, so we're just helping them. All the rest that you mentioned are awesome additions. I went back to the house where I grew up, which was about the best possible place for a biologist to grow up. My sister and I met up with the guy who bought the house. He told us that they had a bull moose standing on the lawn, recently. When I was growing up, it was said that moose couldn't live that far south due to a brain parasite that came from deer. Somebody changed, because there are now moose and the deer numbers have increased at the same time.

However, the 25 acres of field are now so tick infested that I would have had to be treated for lyme disease almost daily. That wouldn't have been good. I'd have ended up wearing a hazmat suit during the summer.

The ticks were ticking time bombs that have now exploded.

Well, they certainly tick me off.

But enough of this tick talk, I'm going cuckoo.

You don't know what cuckoo is.

Isn't it what happens when you get clocked in the head?

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Originally Posted by szlamany

@robdog - old, yes - but so proud of my boys I am! One just got a summer job as a life guard.

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Next we will be hearing about grandkids!

There was a time, not so long ago, when there were only a few active threads in Chit-Chat...now there are over a dozen. People are getting chatty.

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Originally Posted by RobDog888

Next we will be hearing about grandkids!

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Spent too much time at Toad's Place - hearing is not quite what it used to be!

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Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker

There was a time, not so long ago, when there were only a few active threads in Chit-Chat...now there are over a dozen. People are getting chatty.

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I might be wrong, but it seems to me that in the last year or two there are less new threads daily in the major forums here. So we got more free time on our hands.

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Originally Posted by szlamany

Spent too much time at Toad's Place - hearing is not quite what it used to be!

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Hunh. I thought Jeremiah was a bullfrog.

I have a damn gopher or two in my back yard!

Is it a paying customer?

If not, I hear you can make replicas of its friends out of plastic explosive.

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Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker

Is it a paying customer?

If not, I hear you can make replicas of its friends out of plastic explosive.

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My neighbor (2 houses up the hill on same side) caught a gopher with a buried trap the other day. We are wondering if it was just the one gopher doing all the destruction or several. However since its death I haven't seen any new signs of a gopher. os Im crossing my fingers that its a done deal now

You may well be lucky. I'm not sure how CA gophers compare to the NH gophers I am used to, but those had pretty wide territories, and while not exactly solitary, they weren't breeding like rabbits, either.

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I'm not sure how CA gophers compare to the NH gophers I am used to

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Well, they probably use different gang signs for a start. And the East Coast Gophers will be into Notorious B I Gopher while the West coast will go for a mellower Tupaq Squirrel kind of a vibe.

I went looking for a Gangsta Gopher pic to make this post funny and it turns out the Gopher Gang were a real thing:eek:

I assume they were part of some underground movement.

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Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker

You may well be lucky. I'm not sure how CA gophers compare to the NH gophers I am used to, but those had pretty wide territories, and while not exactly solitary, they weren't breeding like rabbits, either.

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Still no new holes. Crossing fingers as still not out of the woods

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Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker

I assume they were part of some underground movement.

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Thats a dirty affiliation to to be a part of

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Originally Posted by RobDog888

Still no new holes. Crossing fingers as still not out of the woods

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I've never known gophers to be in the woods. Ours were always in the fields.

We tried a series of strange attempts to keep the woodchucks out of the gardens. One thing my father tried was peeing all the way around the perimeter of the garden. Unfortunately, it was a large garden, so he had to "save up" for that, which my mother put a stop to once the temperatures got warm enough.

Another thing we tried was putting a radio out in the middle of the garden playing the news. You couldn't play music, of course, because then you'd end up with gopher groupies. They'd be hanging out, smoking the weeds, and snacking on everything else. Whether the news really deterred anything was not clear. They may have just been staying away because they didn't know what "radioactive" meant, but knew it was a bad thing to be.

A third thing was me, camping out by the garden. That may have worked, though I slept through any incursions. Most likely, those oversized rodents were concerned about the loud, growling, beast in the nylon doghouse.