Many years ago a mouse built a nest in one of the heating vents of my car. He lived there peacefully until I went on a climbing trip with friends in the Olympics. We were driving up a steep dirt road to the trailhead, and I turned on the heating to help cool the engine a bit. At some point it got too hot. The mouse jumped out of the vent onto the dashboard of the car to get some fresh air.
It's hard to say who was more surprised: the mouse or the humans. We looked at him in stunned silence. He looked back. Nobody moved for what seemed like about a minute, thought it was probably more like a few seconds. Eventually one of my friends had the presence of mind to grab him and gently drop him out of the window into the bushes at the side of the road.
Then we all laughed hysterically for about 10 minutes. For the rest of the trip you just had to say "the mouse..." and it started all over again. Live well, little mouse!
I have a Prius with solar cells on the roof which power a fan keeping the passenger compartment from getting too stifling while parked in the sun. An adventurous mouse exploring the engine went took a fateful fall and got shredded by that fan. Cost me several hundred dollars to get everything taken apart and cleaned, and I'm sure the tech earned that money.
i worked at a CM-5 facility that had a minor pest problem. i'm pretty sure that like many supercomputers it was cooled by bringing air from underneath the floor and blowing it up through the stack.
the _extremely_ well qualified support personnel had to finally say they weren't going to spend any more days washing rat bits off module boards.
Denver International Airport was built in a very questionable area outside of Denver (there's quite a political story behind that). But one of the unexpected outcomes of this location choice was the interaction between wildlife and the remote parking area.
Some people here also equip their cars with some device that makes a high pitched sound when parked, to scare them away. I can't say if it works with animals, but it scares me away alright.
Perhaps there is a way to add a bitterant to the sheathing. Im sure this has been researched, maybe around the time they switched to tasty biodegradable soy-based harnesses.
Wow, I didn't know that. The first time I saw one was up in the Enchantment Lakes in Washington State. We came around a corner in the trail and heard the squirrels making a furious racket high up in the Douglas Firs above us. I remember thinking "hey, we can't be that scary, what gives?"
We turned a corner around one of the Dougs and there was a big Pine Marten scrambling up the bole of the tree, chasing squirrel for lunch. Mystery solved!
Seems like they are primarily a thing of Europe. They have a special love-relationship with cars, especially the warm engine after stopping the car during the cool and wet season. After a rain and when my car is dirty outside, I can see their footprints all over the chassis. With modern cars and their enclosing of the engine (because of sound pollution) they have a much harder time to find their way into the engine bay where they would readily gnaw at any wiring and hoses they find.
There are super-sonic devices to be installed in the engine bay to shoo them.
In the spirit of HN's creed to encourage curiosity, I want take this opportunity to make my fellow hackers' lives easier and teach you skills for looking up information. Giving up after a Google search indicates you likely have a deficit.
You can use a dictionary or encyclopedia for word definitions. I like the Oxford for its quality, and Wikipedia for its breadth.
User-friendly browsers like Opera 12 and Firefox have features to turn a form or search result into a reusable template that can be triggered with a shortcut from the address bar. I habitually make use of this for looking up definitions.
If you care to take the acquisition of skills to the 95th percentile and beyond, measured against the general population, then the material at Fravia's Searchlores (deliberately not linked) will do that.
The yellow sac spider is attracted to the smell of gas. Mazda had to do a recall on its 6 model of sedans (twice!), covering more than 100K cars in North America, because these spiders got into these cars and built webs which blocked vents, affected fuel pressure, and could have even caused fires and explosions (although the recall seems to have prevented these worst-case scenarios).
At least in terms of wildlife, you're not going to escape this. Stapleton was just too small and getting surrounded by city. If you're building a replacement and have access to land, it makes sense to have a lot of it. At 50+ square miles, you're going to have some wildlife interactions almost regardless of where it is.
My uncle had I think it was a Jeep Cherokee or something similar that had to be basically taken apart and reassembled with new wiring because for that model the manufacturer had used a new kind of wire insulation that mice apparently like to eat.
It's because several modern car manufacturers are using "natural" products for wire insulation and hoses in an effort to be green. Many are soy-based. Rodents call this stuff "delicious."
Toyota was sued over the issue but the suit was dismissed.
Here in the desert west of the USA I use the old half-full bucket of water trick. No swiveling cylinder nor bait needed; because it's dry here the water is the bait. And no bloody mess to clean up.
Curious about what routes you climbed! I did Olympus but that was more glacier hopping than technical, I figured most of the technical multipitch was in the North cascades around index. Would love some recommendations as I just moved
It was a trip up the West Fork of the Dosewallips to Mt Anderson (via Eel Glacier). Class three scrambling and glacier travel. Olympic routes are bushwhacks more than anything else.
For real alpinism you want the North Cascades, e.g., Boston Basin/T-Bone Ridge or Mount Washington. Nowadays I mostly do randonee skiing, in which case Rainier, Baker, and Adams are fine destinations with world class descents.
A mouse broke into my garage one winter and decided to use my not often used car as a nest for babies. I happened to use the car one day shortly after they were born (I assume) and let’s just say the shop was grossed out cleaning it all out. There was a stench for a few weeks still after replacing all the air filters and having the vents cleaned.
In this case I think what happened is the nest more or less was incinerated from the heat of the engine. Hopefully that would have killed anything that would have been aerosolized.
you're probably right. the severity of hanta virus is pretty closely tied to exposure, so it's usually only lethal in cases where people were exposed to a large amount of rodent feces.
however, mice carry around a lot of other biohazards. if it happens again I would say google the disposal process, and/or check the CDC's reference material for it.
Squirrels are really interesting critters. I have a funny memory of my then-girlfriend's brother and his wife showing us home video of their trip to America and her family was totally fascinated with the 20 minutes of squirrel footage. At first I didn't understand why anyone, even those in New Zealand (where there are no squirrels), would see squirrels with the same awe one would show on a trip to a zoo, but I thought about it more and realized how weird they are.
For one, they seem to love roughhousing. Everyone has seen videos of squirrels being flung off of bird feeders by anti-squirrel devices, yet they love to come back for more. They'll go through great lengths just to get a single peanut, they're really daring too, but they're not stupid. My parents for a while constructed a squirrel obstacle course in their backyard and at first the squirrels are skeptical; they'll investigate, back off, come back and get a little closer, back off again until they get comfortable and then they figure it out. There's an unused dog-door at my parents' house and I suggested they extend part of their squirrel maze into their house through it. It was such a good idea they actually did it, and the squirrels did indeed come all the way into the house! They must have reasoned at some level that because those maze structures led to peanuts in the past that there could be a peanut inside the house where the maze lead. Of course this also lead birds like scrub jays observing the squirrels and entering the house as well!
For creatures that are relatively vulnerable to predators, they will relax out in the open in really cartoonish ways. It's humorous when they lie on the edge of a fence with their limbs dangling over both sides.
Periodically, my parents have to trim the pods off their palm trees which are quite tall now. Many of those peanuts the squirrels won from the obstacle course ended up at the top of those palms. It almost seems excessive given the amount of energy they seem to expend getting that food.
There are almost no stray dogs and cats in the US to catch the squirrels. In Bulgaria, there strays are common, squirrels are almost out. As a result, family in Bulgaria can grow tomatoes, strawberries and fruit trees in their yard and eat the fruit. In the East Bay Area, anything not fenced in gets eaten by squirrels. They would pick your fruit, eat one bite and drop it on top of your fence. If you have a fruit tree, you’ll see a line of one-bite fruit along the length of the fence neighbouring it.
Here in Bangalore where stray cats are fairly common, you don't see squirrels all that often. Because they mostly get converted to cat food.
A while back I used to feed pigeons at our home roof top. One day I saw while the pigeons were eating the wheat a cat hunted a pigeon. I realised my wheat feed was acting like a bait for cats to hunt pigeons. Stopped feeding them thereafter because I didn't want to be responsible for helping the cat kill the pigeons.
Rat population is less too. But rats are good at hiding below the earth, but I do witness a cat hunting a rat every other week.
>By the way, the squirrels eating just one bite is annoying for you but perhaps better for the sustainability of the tree?
Probably no difference for the individual tree, but I can imagine that partly eaten fruit being knocked to the ground is part of the seed-dispersal system.
Squirrels are really cool. They are human-like in that they have a level of curiosity and derring-do that seems, uh, greater than what you'd imagine evolution would select for.
We have a squirrel in our neighborhood that my wife and kids started leaving nuts out for. Within a few weeks, she would show up at the back door to wait for a handout. Now she has basically no fear of us. She'll take nuts from the kids' hands. She'll come right up to you, which is alarming if you're just trying to leave the house and don't actually have food on you. We have a Dutch door which we tend to leave open, and she's jumped onto the ledge before. It's probably only a matter of time before she comes all the way in the house, the cats notice, and all hell breaks loose.
A Canadian public-health Web site says although deer mice are the primary carrier of hantavirus, "all rodents including squirrels, rats, chipmunks and other kinds of mice should be treated as if they might carry the virus."
Those Experts™ all started life as egg-spurts just like us. Just do a bit more research and trust your heart and judgment. Generally, the method for disease decisions (epidemiology) is to look up the statistics for your area. You may not even have any Hanta virus cases nearby. And plague is extremely rare. Field rodents aren't as likely to carry disease as city vermin. I wouldn't worry too much about rural squirrels. They are cute and generally eat nuts, not insects. It is far less likely for a squirrel to contract a contagion because the squirrel isn't eating trash like pigeons or rats.
My wife has volunteered at a wildlife rehab place (PAWS) before and worked with squirrels. They have very strict protocols about animal-borne diseases. For example, you don't get to work with bats at all unless you have taken the rabies vaccine.
They don't have any particular protocols around working with local gray squirrels, so I interpret that to mean that there is little risk. There were only 243 cases of bubonic plague globally in 2018. According to the CDC, there are no known cases of hantavirus from squirrels. The only rodent species that have been seen to harbor it are deer mouse, white-footed mouse, rice rat, and cotton rat. (Neither of the latter are rat species you are likely to encounter, which are Norway and roof rats.)
"<common cute urban animal> causes <horrific thing>" is a very pervasive meme because it combines a familiar thing we're drawn to with a high risk negative outcome. That means the meme will spread dramatically out of proportion with its actual likelihood.
I'm from Australia and love watching squirrels when abroad. Our closest equivalents might be rats and possums which are mostly hidden away until night and are nowhere near as entertaining. Meanwhile, squirrels muck around constantly in broad daylight where anyone can spectate - they're always up to something.
people like spider-man movies but just go out and watch squirrels.. it's real life super heroes that fit in your hands. these go so fast, fly left and right you barely see them, quite amazing
They are really smart. I once tried to chase one away from a tree using a fishing rod, but it just moved to a distance an inch longer than where the rod could reach and stayed put, just keeping an eye on me while I was there.
There’s a squirrel in my neighborhood who I swear knows the exact length of my dog’s leash and uses the information for some sort of twisted entertainment. Every time we walk out the front door this squirrel dashes across our path juuust out of my dog’s reach. My dog goes nuts thinking that maybe this time he’ll catch that darn squirrel but of course the squirrel and I both know differently. I really think the squirrel gets a kick out of the whole ordeal.
You're right, there's no squirrels in New Zealand! Must be because only birds could fly here, it's too isolated.
This also means that birds are responsible for more incidents here on the cybersecurity parody site CyberSquirrel, which tracks when wildlife brings down computer systems.
Wait is this also true of China? It would explain why I've seen so many chinese tourists filming squirrels all the time. I've always been a bit baffled.
I had a group of Chinese grad students studying my black walnut trees, which was interesting in itself. They literally spent about two hours watching the squirrels go about their business.
I believe that squirrels are much more common in US (and Canadian?) cities than they are in the parks of the big cities of most other countries, which is why they can be so interesting to tourists.
Up until around mid-19th century or so, they were rare in US cities too. If you saw a squirrel in the city it was probably someone's pet. According to a newspaper account from 1856 New York, hundreds of people gathered around a tree that an escaped pet squirrel was spotted in to watch it.
In the later half of the 19th century, there was a popular movement in park design and management in the US that said that making city parks more natural was essential to the health and wellbeing of city dwellers who did not have time to get out of the city. As part of that many cities purposefully released squirrels into their parks.
This is also why you find Eastern gray squirrels in many cities far outside the Eastern gray's native range (which is as you can guess from the name the eastern US). When people wanted to introduce squirrels into, say, Seattle parks they didn't do what you might expect and send someone out to the nearest forest to rustle up some Western gray squirrels to move to the city. No, they had Eastern grays shipped across country and released those in Seattle parks.
The reason for this is that in many areas the native trees are not the kind of trees people like in their parks and so city parks often were largely populated by imported trees from the eastern US. If those imported trees did not produce the kinds of nuts and seeds that the native squirrels like, then native squirrels weren't going to work out in the parks so they brought in squirrels from where the trees came from.
Unfortunately, Eastern grays aren't very picky eaters. They are quite happy eating the nuts and seeds from the native trees and so quickly spread from the parks to the wild and have largely replaced the native Western gray squirrels in Washington. I think the Western grays here are down to just one population.
(The other native squirrels here, Douglas, Red, and Northern flying) weren't affected much by the spread of Eastern grays because they fill sufficiently difference niches in the ecosystem. With Western grays on the other hand Eastern grays are essentially slightly smaller versions of them that like a much bigger variety of nuts and seeds).
> I believe that squirrels are much more common in US (and Canadian?) cities [...]
Yes, very common in Canada. I live in Montreal and frequently have as many as four just hanging out in my backyard.
Funnily enough, gray squirrels were also introduced in London parks in the 19th century and have completely taken over the city, much like here in North America.
I worked with two guys who ran Sheep farms in Australia. Once at the lunch time they saw a couple squirrels (this was in Sri Lanka) and they were really fascinated by them. They said they don't have squirrels in Australia and I was fascinated by that. A quick Google kind of says there are at least a few still left[1] in Australia.
Can confirm. Went on a trip NZ->UK and was fascinated. They're so twitchy, fast and inquisitive, and so furry. They are legitimately as interesting to watch to me as almost any zoo animal.
There are squirrels in Brazil. They aren't as common as the (about equally sized) marmosets, but they are not all that rare. They are called "caxinguelê" or "serelepe".
In tangentially related news, I have a huge, 250+ year-old black walnut tree here in Seattle. It bears one walnut a year, and this time a local chipmunk got it before I could. He then carried it up next to my second story deck and tormented me with it while I watched helplessly a roof away.
Tangent from yours: I have a very old pecan tree in my yard that'll easily fill a couple of 5-gallon buckets. More pecans than I could possibly want in a year. I thought this was great when I bought the place.
Instead what I get to do is fill a couple of 5-gallon buckets with green, unripened nuts that the fucking squirrels decided to remove from the tree 2 months before they're ready. Last year I found exactly 0 viable nuts. They were all stripped off the tree before their time.
I just convince myself that their happiness is my happiness. And the shade is still good.
Many years ago during one of the big corporate training events in room of about 80 people we had a little icebreaker activity, where we had to say something interesting about ourselves that nobody else knew. I don't remember what I or anyone else said, except for one lady. She was a high powered account executive or something, but as aside, she said she owned a peach and nut orchard somewhere in California, and she had a big permanently loaded shotgun in her car to "kill the f*cking squirrels" (her exact quote) as she drove through the property because otherwise "they'd get nothing at all".
Great vivid picture and great icebreaker!
Growing up I lived near a Russian couple that had emigrated post revolution around the time of WWI. They had a good amount of property that they covered with various vegetables in the summer. Very industrious people.
The husband despised the squirrels for ruining both his garden as well as his bird feeders. Being handy, he put one bird feeder on a metal articulating arm out the kitchen window. And then he wired it to the outside light switch.
He got much joy out of flipping that switch and shocking the tree rats!
Preach! We have lots and lots of blueberry bushes that are apparently here on earth only to feed deer. We've never managed to get a single blueberry. We do get a lot of beautiful deer (and coyotes, and bobcats, and raccoons, and bears).
That seems accurate. I have a mulberry tree (quite tall!), and if I don't pick mulberries every morning during its 4-week fruiting time, I just end up with purple poo all over my yard instead.
We also have a black walnut that drops lots of fruit. The previous owner generously left the nut gatherer they used to pick it all up and it made the job super easy. I share this with you now in the spirit of stinky walnut hands.
I've always been curious as to why squirrels have never been domesticated and bred to serve as pets. A wide variety of other rodents (mice, rats, hamsters) are already available as pets, having been domesticated over many generations, and it isn't obvious why no one has ever tried this with squirrels.
Some quick research shows that a big part of the problem is diet: squirrels require a surprisingly complex and varied diet that is hard for pet owners to replicate. Getting them enough physical activity is also an issue.
(Of course, one might suspect that it would be cruel to keep squirrels in such unnatural conditions, but the same could be said of most pets.)
[edit: Apparently keeping wild, undomesticated squirrels as pets was popular at one point (https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/pet-squirrel-craze ). That article doesn't say why the trend died out, other than...all of the obvious reasons.]
[edit 2: Would a squirrel raised indoors always think it was summer, or would they start storing and then digging up food as the year progressed even with no change in temperature? Might be relevant.]
Haven't all large domesticated pets (i.e. those that can't be kept in a cage) been used for practical purposes for hundreds of years before they became mere pets in modern times? Like cats were used for pest control and dogs for all kinds of workloads.
Domesticating rats takes about 20-30 generations. Squirrels, though, take about 9 months to mature; rats are much faster, less than 2 months, which is probably one of many reasons why we've domesticated rats but not squirrels.
Still, hypothetically, it should be possible to domesticate squirrels within a few decades. In foxes, domestication only took 7 generations, so it could even be faster.
Incidentally, I have a new startup idea: first you domesticate squirrels, then you produce a line of commercially packaged squirrel food and an "invisible fence" type system for "outdoor" squirrels.
My parents had a terrier when I was younger, and she loved it when it was time to mow the grass. She would be out there eating her fill of the field mice that got flushed out and just having a blast.
I've pretty sure I've got at least 100 peanuts stashed in my garage from a Douglas squirrel that likes to hang around my place. I give her peanuts and for the last month or two she mostly has stashed them instead of eating them right away like she did earlier in the summer. And most of the time she stashes them, she does so somewhere in my garage.
She runs the same general circuit most of the time, going up the left wall, crossing the rafters to the right, stashing the nuts somewhere up there (I haven't yet gotten around to getting a ladder and trying to find out just where she puts them), and then exiting somewhere on the right (she has a couple of different ways she comes down).
As far as I've seen none of the eastern gray squirrels that are more common here use my garage. I've only ever seen them burying peanuts in my yard, or taking them somewhere off my property.
There's a recent survival TV show which had 10 people attempt to live off the land for 100 days in the Canadian far north in the fall and early winter (daytime temps started at 20C and went down to -20C during that time, nights were even colder). A few of the people found squirrels' mushroom stashes and ate them. Several people caught squirrels and ate them as well, but one got very sick and had to be evacuated early.
It was also interesting to see the extent humans would go through to stash the food they had hunted or caught -- for instance, elevated platforms in the trees -- and the determination of animals such as bears, wolverines, and foxes to raid the stashes.
Squirrel can't stop and will not stop. Needs the vault to survive in winter. The man could consider to put a big squirrel box near on a tree from the garden and put all the nuts inside. That would made a nice Christmas history.
Is amazing how many nuts the squirrel has harvested.
Oaks produce huge numbers of acorns about one season every 7 years. My yard had thousands and thousands a few years ago, for example, but very few since. Oaks seem to do this to overwhelm squirrels and ensure that a few acorns manage to germinate. Squirrels that can save acorns for years will do much better than squirrels that can only save enough for each winter.
Similarly, periodical cicadas synchronously emerge in great numbers (more 370 per square meter) every 13th or 17th year.[1] This overwhelms predators and it's thought that the prime-numbered intervals prevent predators from synchronizing their reproductive cycles with that of the cicadas.
Does anyone know what would happen to the squirrel if he/she realizes their entire year's of investment is gone? Does it have feelings to feel angry / sadness?
Would the Squirrel likely starve (or if it was a breadwinner would the whole family starve), or would another squirrel help it out?
If anyone has interesting resources to learn about squirrels that could help me investigate more please share.
Squirrels are known to spy on each other and to steal each other's "investments." (Also, if one notices that another is watching, it will pretend like it's hiding the food here and then take it someplace else.)
Not just other squirrels. I have seen a magpie sitting on a wall waiting for a squirrel to finish burying its nut. Once the squirrel had finished, it descended to have a good poke around the burial area.
The ground squirrels (I see them mostly in South San Jose) live in multigenerational burrows and dont venture too far out. I bet they stumble upon other family members' caches.
Last winter, we had a rat create a nest in our car. We would drive around during the day, so it would take advantage of the heat from the engine. We tried clearing the nest out night after night, but it kept building it in different areas near the engine. We even tried mint extract to keep it away, but that only worked for short periods of time and it would still come back. Traps were useless, even with peanut butter.
Luckily, one day after a fresh snowfall, we noticed a trail of rat footprints, and then at the end of the trail, a dead, bloody rat. From the tracks we saw, it seems a feathered predator saw the rat and took care of problem.
When I was a broke college student I lived in an apartment next to a vacant building. Once the vacant was bought all the mice that had been living there decided to come to our apartment. We tried some mice traps but didn't have much success and couldn't really afford to buy different types.
After some research I discovered the toilet paper roll to to trash method. You setup stairs using boxes to a toilet paper roll with peanut butter on the end. The mouse goes to the end to get the peanut butter, the roll tips over before the mouse can back out and falls into the trash can
What they don't say and was surprised by was that mice can jump nearly two feet into the air and was scared when one escaped.
To solve the problem you fill the trash with enough water so the mouse can't jump not climb over the lip of the trash can.
Most of the mice were trapped when I was at class but once when I was doing homework I found out mice can swim for about thirty minutes at full speed before they give up.
I had a box of bird seed on a shelf in my garage, next to a box of nails. One day I go in, and see that all the nails are in a layer in the bird seed box, covering up the seed. I can only assume a squirrel did this.
Red squirrels once filled up my engine compartment with stuff, causing my accelerator to stick down at one point pretty close to full throttle on a highway. I had the presence of mind to just turn off the car, though to this day I wonder if I escaped a squirrel assassination.
We had this happen to our truck when I was a kid. The exhaust pipe was packed from the catalytic converter back through the muffler. It took a bit to figure out what was going on and then I had to get under and cut holes in the exhaust pipe in a couple places until I found clear pipe.
After that we started putting soup cans over the exhaust pipes if they were going to sit more than a day or two.
I had squirrels put black walnuts inside my engine, including the space in the hood so that they rolled out when I opened it to see the engine covered in nut pieces. I think they were responsible for the wiring issues I had with that car. Also found several boxes filled with black walnuts in my garage. I hate red squirrels.
Since most of HN doesn't know, there's a big difference between grey/fox squirrels that most people see running around outside and these red devils. I would argue most haven't even seen these, they are smaller, more skittish, and typically only live around areas that have a lot of pine trees.
For one, red squirrels aren't quiet, they bark and chitter all the time for warning calls or territorial challenging. They aren't social so much as combative. Extremely territorial and destructive to housing. These are the ones that will eat through wood siding then destroy attic insulation on their quest to overwinter indoors and store tree nuts inside the walls. When it's not pecan nuts rolling by in walls, they are beating the shit out one another or barking and chittering as you or your pets are nearby. Sound, smells, ultrasonic, predator calls, all ineffective to get them to leave a space once they settle in. If they have young, you can't remove (either by relocation, plugging up the hole they made, or killing) until the young is out or they'll die and stink up the house. Even if you do plug a hole, they'll spend days trying to get back in barking and scratching the whole time.
I can't think of a wild animal I hate more. Exterminators don't have a high success rate against them, traps are rarely effective (and they learn fast if they escape), and the amount of damage they cause is obscene.
Yes, it's common for squirrels to eat the wiring harness. More expensive these days since cars are so full of tightly packed wires in hard-to-get-to places.
If you can figure out how, you can use it against them. Create an inviting place for a squirrel to store nuts. Let the squirrel harvest the nuts for you. Then collect them from the squirrel's stash. It's easier than gathering them off of the ground yourself every day.
Animals are too smart. Designs for bear boxes used to carry food for backcountry camping have to be regularly tested as given enough exposure, bears will figure out how to open them and eat all the tasty granola bars inside.
My aunt is a schoolteacher who lives in the NE US.
Once, she had purchased candy corn along with other groceries, to take to class, but absentmindedly forgot to bring the plastic bag with the sealed bag of it inside.
When she went out to the car the next day, there was no such bag to be found, leaving her rather confused as to how she could have left it somewhere.
A few days later, when driving, she heard _something_ rolling around in the outside of the car, and after a few rounds of looking and seeing nothing visible, a few kernels of candy corn rolled along the floor where she could see.
She took the car in, they went looking around, and went "...we can definitely tell there was _something_ living in there, but whatever it is, it's gone now. We've removed the candy corn we found." (It was not a whole bag, just a few dozen kernels. No sign of the bag that bag was in either.)
Was something living in the car unnoticed before and smelled the bag, and extracted it to its home under the hood? (I've certainly observed areas with nothing but "sealed" bags of candy corn carrying the distinctive smell before.) Did something smell it from outside and find a way in?
We will never know, but it was quite an odd experience to just find candy corn rolling along the floor from nowhere.
Bonus recollection:
Somehow, my family member's car was cursed in some way, and on multiple occasions, with the car located at different homes each time, a nest of bees was discovered in the frame.
The first time, the car was parked near a house, and there were plenty of plants and naturally bees around, so that was unsurprising.
The second time, it was living at an apartment complex without much foliage around at all, or any bees noticed anywhere.
If it had been the same place, one might wonder if the first bees had returned, but it looks like that distance is usually very limited, and he had moved a good number of miles away.
A "not mine" recollection:
A certain car vendor had to have multiple recalls because it was found that spiders were invading the car, because the concentrations of gasoline vapor were high enough to attract certain spiders but not high enough to kill them, and they would sometimes weave webs that blocked key locations. (It was Mazda, if you want to look up more details.)
Similarly, a pack rat once stripped all of the wire insulation foreword of the firewall and used it to built a nest in the engine bay of my dad's truck. Rather rude surprise to find when opening the hood to figure out why it wouldn't turn over.
What’s wrong with that TrustArc cookies banner popup? I was able to dismiss it only if accepting everything.. maybe my adblock is blocking its requests?
I’m in Europe and after I hit “no” on everything, it spent like 30s “processing”.
Then I get this headscratcher:
> This page transmits information using https protocol. Some vendors cannot receive opt-out requests via https protocols so the processing of your opt-out request is incomplete. To complete the opt-out process, please click here to resubmit your preferences.
Years ago a roommate was away on vacation and when he came back his room was ransacked: two jars of almonds were chewed through and almonds were all over the floor. It turns out squirrels entered through the AC exhaust pipe and did their thing. About 3/4 of the almonds were taken by the squirrels, it’s impossible that they ate them in the room, they must have stashed them somewhere else..
We had a similar situation with cat food. The car was smelling like cat food, but we couldn't tell why, but when we took it in for servicing they found that the ventilation system was full of cat food. Turns out some small animal got into our extra bag of cat food in the garage, and decided it made more sense to store it in the car.
The woodworker in me hopes that he keeps the nuts covered in those buckets for two months and gets rewarded with gallons of beautiful all natural walnut stain!
Oh My God that Sinclair cookie stuff. I could never get to the actual article. Also I know they are a horrible media company, working against humanity in so many ways; but I digress.
If there was ever an appropriate time to say it, it's now: Deez Nuts!
I love HN!
Bill gates gets a divorce - downvoted and banned, because it has nothing to do with tech.
Squirrel stores nuts in parked truck - up to the frontpage with you!
Many years ago a mouse built a nest in one of the heating vents of my car. He lived there peacefully until I went on a climbing trip with friends in the Olympics. We were driving up a steep dirt road to the trailhead, and I turned on the heating to help cool the engine a bit. At some point it got too hot. The mouse jumped out of the vent onto the dashboard of the car to get some fresh air.
It's hard to say who was more surprised: the mouse or the humans. We looked at him in stunned silence. He looked back. Nobody moved for what seemed like about a minute, thought it was probably more like a few seconds. Eventually one of my friends had the presence of mind to grab him and gently drop him out of the window into the bushes at the side of the road.
Then we all laughed hysterically for about 10 minutes. For the rest of the trip you just had to say "the mouse..." and it started all over again. Live well, little mouse!