Monday 14 September 2015

One Could Go On About the Critters

The once-a-month pest guy told me about the mice this morning. I showed him one of the ancient mousetraps Doris McCarthy used for decades. Still the best kind, the guy said, with a little peanut butter. I've seen the ones that emit a frequency we can't hear but the mice can. They work for about a week until the mice get used to them. He went on. If you have a large mouse population, those traps are what we use. Once we cull the population by about two-thirds, we go to the poison and the bait, and that controls them.
Here, dear readers of this blog--that's you uncle Ahab and aunt Bee--we can all insert stories of living with a certain antenna-heavy insect the size of one of those clickers we used to get at the fair, for instance. 
Today down on the groyne, it was Mr or Ms river otter slick with a mouthful of weed off the lower rocks that gave me a look and carried on. You might be able to spot him/her here:









Maybe not. As for the groyne, a new word in my book, it's one of four massive but composed rock piles, essentially, designed to take the brunt of the waves and thus protect the base of the bluffs and the properties above.








Even the most benign wave action as seen from a peek over bluff-edge 60 metres up will pick the speck from a rock's pocket, if it finds one, and replace it with its million psi of lake Ontario. I'm not sure whether to feel such effects or just notice them.

And part of being down here is the climb back.

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