Working The Problem

Captured!

 As The Lovely Harvey was doing her morning routine, she spotted our "guest" sniffing around the garage bathroom.

She says it walked rather than ran away and she managed to get it under an unused cat-food storage container.

 The poison in the bait we used is bromethalin from Victor.

Our guest is showing clear signs of nuero problems and the picture above is the best it's looked since capture.

It's not responding at all to light and has started chewing on itself.

Other evidence of it eating the poison is the bright green turd half out its butt.

I hate this.

I don't shirk from killing vermin, it's necessary, but I'm an animal lover and I hate that I have to do it.  If it'd stayed outside, I wouldn't have had to.

Circle of life and all. 

Zoo Boo

 

Last night we did the Zoo Tampa at Lowery Park's Creatures of the Night Halloween thing.

We bought memberships for the zoo and that has paid for itself already in free parking, admission and discounts!

Harvey and I get free admission until Dec 31, 2027 and we each get a plus one too.

It supports the zoo and helps the animals.

They are also super good with kids like The Boy.

Actual Florida animals!

 

 

Rat Update

The blocks of poison are being eaten and the ones by the garbage can keep disappearing.

Not sure how long the poison takes to kill a rat, or how many are out there in the garage.

Prolly more than I'd like.

It's tempting to send everyone out someplace else and fire up the car in the garage for a few hours. 

Did Monsieur Enjoy His Last Meal?

One of the blocks of rat poison we left out is about 1/4 eaten!

I have no idea how much of a block it needs to consume to meet Rat Jeebus, but this is a good sign we got the right poison! 

Rats!

It happens occasionally.

We have a fruit rat in the garage.

I thought I heard it chewing on something near the car-parts shelf, but couldn't flush it out.

Tonight we saw the cat food container was well chewed.

Poisons on order. 

Gator Crossing

The picture Marv was calling, "camera camera camera!" for:

Honestly, we don't see a gator every day.

One of our friends who lives near where this was taking says its name is Henry. 

Bigger Bar

I found new information about the bear referenced by Ron White.

The 7mm part of the routine bugged me.

Turns out it was 7mm Remington Magnum, and a semi-auto rifle not a revolver.

The bear tared out at 1,600 lb., so it's ST 23 not 21.

It absorbed 12 rounds, total of 7mm Rem Mag. 

7mm Rem Mag does 7d+2 pi.  Average roll is  26.  24 penetrates for 24 points of damage per shot on average with FMJ.  A soft-point would do 7d+2(0.5) pi+.  The average roll would get 20 to penetrate for 30 damage.

The only semi-auto I can find that has more than 5 shots that's chambered in 7mm Rem Mag is an AR10 derivative from Great Lakes Firearms & Ammunition, the GL10.  There's a lot of red flags with the story, see below...

Because of the recoil (Rcl 4), prolly gonna take one shot per round and not the full 3.

BALL
First shot drops the bear to -1 with a consciousness roll and half move and dodge.
Second shot drops it to -25, consciousness roll and death roll.
Third shot drops it to -49, consciousness roll and death roll.
Fourth shot drops it to -73, consciousness roll and death roll.
Fifth shot drops it to -97, consciousness roll and death roll.
Sixth shot drops it to -121, auto-death.

HOLLOW POINT
First shot drops the bear to -7 with a consciousness roll and half move and dodge.
Second shot drops it to -37, consciousness roll and death roll.
Third shot drops it to -67, consciousness roll and death roll.
Fourth shot drops it to -97, consciousness roll and death roll.
Fifth shot drops it to -127, auto-death.

Clearly our ranger rolled below average on his damage dice, and appears to have missed a few times with the first magazine.

Oh, and it's appropriate that I GURPS'd this all up because it appears to be an internet hoax! 

According to Gaber and department records, the bear was shot Oct. 15, 2001, on Hinchenbrook Island at the mouth of Prince William Sound, by 22-year-old airman Ted Winnen from Eilson Air Force Base.

Winnen was deer hunting, but bear season was also open. He and a friend spotted the bear fishing along a river about 40 yards away. They decided it was a shooter, but the bear disappeared in the underbrush. It had not seen or smelled the hunters. It reappeared about 10 yards away. Winnen shot it through the head with a .338 Winchester Magnum (not a 7 mm mag.) and bowled it over. He then emptied the rifle into its vital area to make sure it was dead. It did not charge the hunter(s) as was claimed.

Official records showed that the bear was an Alaskan brown bear and measured 10 feet, 6 inches from head to toe and weighed an estimated 1,000-1,200 pounds. It was a nice, trophy brown bear, but it wasn’t 12½ feet at the shoulder and didn’t weigh 1,600 pounds. Nor was it even close to breaking the world record.

 1,200 lb is back to 21 hit points.  .338 Win Mag does 8d pi.  That's an average roll of 28.

I'm going to assume that "through the head" means a skull shot, so 24 penetrates for 96 points of damage, dropping the bear to -75 in one shot.  That's one consciousness roll and three death rolls, and clearly the bear did not make one of them (a total of 59% to make all three death rolls is, of course, not a sure thing).

The real account still GURPS! 

Mr Elusive

We moved the feeder to keep the squirrels off and hoped our resident cardinal would come investigate.

The whole family came!

Apologies for the artifacts from shooting with my phone from behind both a screen and chicken wire from the porch.

The cardinals are VERY skittish, but they are definitely eyeing the feeder and thinking about getting closer to the monkey cage and the collection of cats.

There was a third one I didn't manage to get a picture of, but I think we have Mom, Dad and Son in the area until Dad drives Son off.

Feeding The Wildlife

My mom loved cardinals more than any other bird.

She set out feeders to attract them so she could watch them more often.

My area has a resident cardinal who has a sixth sense about cameras.

I am determined to get a good photo, but he's very camera shy.

My best pic so far.

So we set out a feeder.

Little did we know we'd set out a squirrel feeder.

My grampa, famously, hated tree-rats, and some of that has rubbed off on me in how I talk about them, but I don't really mind squirrels that mind their own business.

It was also kinda fun watching them do their gymnastics to get at the feeder.

But it wasn't for them, and they're keeping the birds away, so we moved it to a spot that forces them to break cover longer than they're comfortable doing.

Now we see them returning to the place where the feeder used to be and looking confused.  We're almost feeling sorry enough to get then their own feeder. 

Photobombed

 

Marv tried to take a nice picture of this bald eagle, but NASA decided to shoot off some fireworks in the background.

He's secured legal representation.

Hole

The Lovely Harvey found an animal's burrow in our back yard by collapsing the roof of it and falling into the resulting hole.

Visions of sinkholes dancing in our heads...  We probed around and found the ground to be nice and solid beneath and around the collapsed area.

Today I moved from dirt from the corner behind the shed to the crater/burrow.

All better.

I think it's an abandoned turtle/tortoise burrow.  It's the right size and shape and we get scooters every time we get a lot of rain in sort period of time when they move, temporarily, to higher ground. 

Spicy Diesel

I captured Stripey the FEMA Kitty so we could clean up her eye a little bit.

She hissed and popped as I picked her (confirmed) up and purred like an idling Kenworth while we cleaned her face and paws.

She seemed contented to be held, but once I sat down and let her be on my belly, she sauntered back to the cover of the rims.

Hissing and popping resumed, but she was letting me pet her in her safe space.

Our Milton Refugee

We have an outdoor kitten.

Meet "Stripey the FEMA Kitty."

She(?) is very spicy and doesn't tolerate being petted.  Yet.

We've got dry food out for her and do an evening ritual of feeding her some wet food.

Sometime today something happened and she spent a while with her left eye closed up.  She was fine in the morning and doing a pirate imitation at noon.  She's still squinting a bit with it.

Shadow is VERY interested in the interloper.

For reference, Shadow was the same size as Stripey when we brought her in, literally, last year...  On national Cat Day.

Hunting Good Life

Beeper captured a ring-necked snake on the back porch.

I found out because Harvey, no lover of snakes, texted me that Beeper had it in the kitchen.  Beeper took it back out to the porch to keep the monkeys from taking her new toy away.

As you can see, that didn't work.

The snake has been relocated to the back yard to continue catching and eating vermin.

I Blame Al Gore

Love bug season has been surprisingly light this year.

Good!

There were reports a few years ago that some species of dragonfly had adapted to handle eating the acidic things, that could explain a lot of their absence because they're clearly unused to predation.

You Are Not A Toad

 

Apparently this dry-foot Cuban did not get the memo that she's sitting on a toadstool.

Let Me Ax You Something

 

Canon EOS M50, EF-S55-250mm: f/5.6, 1/320", 154mm, ISO 800

Soft focus effect from shooting through the screen door.

Ewwwwww

Our big torch that we use to light the bonfires wouldn't light the other night.

Marv noticed that the gas was coming out the aeration holes up by the valve.

He surmised that it must be clogged.

I decided to find that clog.

I did.

An anole had crawled all the way up to the aeration holes and become lodged there and died.

Because you cannot disassemble the damn thing, I had to drag the poor thing's corpse out through those aeration holes one teeny, icky, part at a time.

Blech!

Depth Of Field

With the big lens on, in program mode I could focus on the turtle's head or its shell.

250mm, f/5.6, 1/400", ISO500

Remembering how depth of field works, I changed to aperture priority and cranked the f-stop.

250mm, f/32, 1/400", ISO 12800

I'm kind of proud of myself for remembering this.