Kaolian and the Case of the Mysterious Attic Monster of DoomFollow

It just goes to show, they never look up.

For the past several nights I have been awakened from my normal sleep by strange, unusual, one might even say troubling, sounds which appear to eminate from somewhere up in the attic of my two story house. Scrathing and clacking, starting every night at precisely 3:07am.

The sounds last for about 30 seconds, and then stop, as suddenly as they began, never more to be heared that night until the next.

What could they be? the troubled remnants of a partially reanimated skelliton twitching to life at the exact hour of its cruel and untimely attic murder? A rodent of Unusal Size? A midget burgler? Poultrygeists?

As it turns out the latter was actually a pretty close guess. I looked inside the attic the next morning, didn't see anything. No evidence of animals, no missing insulation, no droppings, nothing. No dead bodies either. So I started looking around the outside. Eventually this morning I noticed something. At first I took it to be a really, really, really big hornet nest wedged up under the roof eaves in a corner. Thats what I thought, until I saw the bird head stick out of it.

Apperently, I have two large bird nests containing possibly Barn swallows or finches (not starlings for certain) that are located just on the other side of the wall from my headboard in my bedroom. The final piece to the mystery though, was the precise timing of the disturbances. Apperently it is just cold enough that my heater is fireing at about 3am every morning. There is a section of ducting near the nests that has a bit of a rattle. It's apperenly waking the birds up and scaring the crap out of them, they try to fly inside their little mud nest things, and then they go back to sleep.

I saw several baby birds pokeing their heads out of the nest during the day when I was down in the yard, so I figure i'll wait until they are grown to blast the nests off the side of the house (they will otherwise apperently keep expanding them to a huge colony which will damage the sideing) but now at least I know what it is.

And now, so too do you. And you cannot un-know it. This post will sit in your brain, festering like a uh... festerpost? until eventually it forces you to write your own. Mwahahahahaha!!!!

Yeah i got nuthin...

Swallows? Do you know if they brought you any coconuts?

We had baby robins a while back. One of them didn't survive the rooftop flying lessons and was dead in our driveway. I couldn't even look at the poor thing, so I put it under the "things Joph will have to deal with when he comes home" heading in my mental file cabinet and headed about my daily activities.

Then I ran over it with the car on the way to get Jr. a haircut and burst into tears, even though it was already dead. (Stupid hormones) I called Joph to ask if it was even possible to remove it now, and he very matter-of-factly responded that it wouldn't be there the next morning because something would eat it.

He was right. I was at once nauseated and amazed at nature's efficiency.

When I moved into one of the rooms in Riverside, its previous occupant, an overly jocular pothead, tried to convince me it was haunted. He said that for months at a time, late at night he would hear a ghost knocking on the walls. It would move around one side of the room, going tap...tap...tap...tap...tap. This was an attic room, with a crawlspace closet on that side. Rumor had it that a Guatemalan (I think) immigrant family was living in that closet; Tom thought they had died and their spirits were haunting him.

When I moved in during the summer, eventually I heard the knocking a few months later, just as he said. It happened around my birthday, early November. I tracked the knocking as it roamed around the room, ending at the baseboard heater. Yes, that's right, my idiot friend was being haunted for years by heating pipes.

Unfortunatly I have Starlings too. I know where they were nesting, and that one I had no problem eliminating (it used to be on top of my front porch brick column. They have since relocated to a different house.

The house that you burned down as a child is coming back to haunt you!

Pussies. My mother is hosting a Fruit Bat colony in her yard.

Mind you I don't like Starlings, either. But Swallows are amazing. I'd put up a framework and reinforce the wall and have an organic Swallow Colony Feature Wall.

Dude. Owls are awesome. They're all over the woods out here.

I forget what kind, though. I hear its call all the time.

I got lots of cover. In fact the bird feeders are all on the edge of the woods (cept the hummingbird feeder that hangs from the house). Both the owl scat pellets were left on the driveway and the pile of feathers just off it. I guess the wide open run way leaves the buggers vulnerable.

Also, I've expanded my garden this year so maybe it's just as well that I have my own local predator to keep the veggie vandals at bay. I've only spotted the owl as fleeting flaps of wing and the gust of wind that goes with it, but hear it all the time. It gets up about 4:30 in the afternoon and starts hooting - sounds like it's about a block away.

The hummingbirds aren't bothered they're back in force.

Grats on your great eco-system Elinda. It's a sign of health when a top predator can live there.

They work for the short term, but in the long run you're going to have to learn how to walk without rhythm.

Ouch, depending on how much honey they stored, repairs for that can get speeeeeendy

Why bother with traps when you can just use explosives?