Where have all the flowers gone?

I recently returned from a month long trip. Our back yard was looking pretty overgrown and since the El Nino has ended and it is raining again, it seemed a good time to do some “bush whacking”. I noticed though that several of the potted plants have disappeared. That is, the pots are still there but no signs of any plants.

I think I have discovered where all the flowers went:

He has replaced the hanging plants!

Such a cozy bed!

Taken before I went on the trip - I should have known!

Even the mama cat now likes the flower pots! Sigh!

Cat in the tree

Last Sunday morning I heard a commotion across the way. The neighbors in the opposite apartment leave their door open a lot and apparently a stray cat had gotten in and they were trying to get it out. The poor cat was trapped in their window and couldn’t get out because of the screen. It was a pretty uncoordinated effort. Two kids were outside poking sticks at the cat through the screen while somebody on the inside was hitting it every time it dropped to the floor. Eventually somebody decided to open the drape on one side and the cat scooted out of the window on the inside and was frantically slipping and clawing on the tile floor trying to get away as they kept whacking at it with their sticks. It finally got straightened out and scooted out the door – only to be met by the family’s big long-haired cat who promptly attacked it. We heard some screeching and then the intruder came leaping across the pavement and climbed up the big talisay tree while the family stood in their doorway laughing at the scene. Their cat didn’t try to follow it up the tree and eventually went inside.

I didn’t think any more of it. The next afternoon a warkman said there was a cat stuck in the tree. When I looked I realized it was the one who had been chased up the day before. It was a young cat, still a kitten really. White and black and quite handsome. A worker who is a good tree climber attempted to get it but it was scared and he said it tried to bite him and only climbed higher up in the tree.

The next morning I could see him out the second story window all curled up comfortably on a branch about 20 feet up. Periodically he’d meow but made no effort to come down. I figured that eventually if he got hungry enough he’d come down, especially at night when there were fewer people and less commotion. But he didn’t come down that day either. I looked on the internet for ideas. Most had unhelpful advice such as calling the animal rescue squad or a tree trimming company, none of which exist here. But they all advised trying to get it down if it had been there more than 12 hours. And several refuted the idea that cats will always come down. They said that sometimes they are too scared and will cling for days until they are so weak they fall. Kittens especially. One guy said he was a tree trimmer and had seen cat skeletons in trees. Of course I get more upset thinking about the poor cat starving to death and having to listen to his plaintive meowing for days. I certainly couldn’t reach him, our ladder didn’t go high enough. Nobody else was interested in risking their life climbing up there and trying to grab a scared cat. The worker tried poking the cat with a long pole but it just climbed even higher.
Since I couldn’t do anything else, I decided to just pray. I know, it seems crazy to pray for a cat, what with a world full of humans who desparately need prayer. But on the other hand, God created cats too and the Bible says He even cares for the sparrows. Maybe somebody’s guardian angel could take a few minutes off during a slow time to give guidance to a poor traumatized kitten in a tree?

Well, the next day (day 4) the cat was gone. No more pitiful meowing and no cat in the tree. Later that afternoon I thought I heard it again and sure enough, there it was eating some leftover rice in front of another neighbor’s apartment- on the ground.

So did God send an angel? Maybe. Maybe He sent mine, because that evening, sometime after I prayed, I got distracted while carrying a bowl of boiling hot soup and spilled it all over my hand. It certainly provided a painful distraction to worrying about the cat! Ha, ha!

Yard kittens and ants

Ooops! Here a couple of back entries that didn't get entered for "operational reasons". (Well, that's what the airlines say when planes are late).

August 2009

Roof kittens become yard kittens

The two kittens we had been feeding on the neighbor's roof finally came down. Luckily all this time no one has moved in yet but since that could change at any time, we needed to figure out a way to get the kittens to come down into our yard and eat there (not to mention that it would be a whole lot easier for us to feed them there!) We started putting their food closer and closer to the edge of the roof near our place. Then I started putting it on the wall between the two apartments. They protested at first but hunger overcame fear and soon they were eating on the wall. But the wall is narrow and more than once they knocked the food off the wall trying to both get at it at the same time. And the ants were becoming a problem on the wall. But the problem was, how to get them down?

With some trial and error, we made a cat ladder from tree branches, plastic twine, and left over wood, with the rungs close enough together for kitten legs. In no time at all they had figured out how to use it and now gallop up and down several times a day!

And now they have made themselves at home, playing with a rubber centipede a friend donated!

September 2009

Be careful where you sit
We have had some major ant wars recently. There are several species which like different habitat. There are the medium sized black ants which mainly live outdoors but march around in columns and seem attracted to water. (See picture.) They only bite if you accidentally compress them while they are running over your body somewhere.

There are the tiny almost no-seeum brown ants that LOVE the cat’s food dishes, and any kind of crumbs, sweet or savory. They are wide ranging and love to bite. These monsters can crawl into beds, on chairs, desks, computer keyboards, etc. They seem to live in cracks in the wall.

Then there are the medium sized red ants – miniature fire ants. These live outdoors (so far) and march in columns. They are especially attracted to dead bugs and animals, and cat food. They bite without provocation and cause quite an itchy burning bite and the pain can last for days.

We finally declared war because it was getting so bad. We found some “ant houses” at the hardware store filled with a syrup that attracts the ants. They take it back to their nests and it kills off the whole lot. This seems to have been effective with the small brown ants. I can once again take a nap on the floor without being bitten up.

The red ants were especially annoying as they seeme to be taking over the back yard. We didn’t want to spray because of potential harm to pets and environment. And since the roof kittens are now yard kittens, we didn't want them playing with the leaky "ant houses" we used in doors. I found instructions for natural methods on the internet. So for several days I would pour boiling water on the main nest holes and then douse the area with blenderized pomelo peels and water. Citrus peels are supposed to have some ingredient that insects don’t like. Pomelos have very thick skins and so I was able to quickly make a lot of the mixture. Now a month later, the ants are still there but in greatly reduced numbers and confined to a much smaller area.

Rat Update

June 8, 2009

Since we have been able to close the windows we have not had any more nocturnal damage to our fruit and vegetables. But it sure does make the place hot! The rat has not yet given up trying to get in. For the last three days he has apparently tried to climb up the glass and has left his urine all over the outside. We know he is BIG because the glass panes still have nearly a ½ inch gap between them. I am sure if he could get through, he would have done so. (Though he would still have to deal with our new screen.)

Saturday much of our white cement and saltine cracker mixture that we put at the back of the empty apartment next door had disappered. We refilled it and put out more dishes. Sunday I didn’t go check the dishes next door but the BIG rat had again left evidence of trying to get in through the window. I bought a kilo of bread crumbs from a bakery. It must have cake crumbs in it too because it smells really good! This afternoon we went to refill the bait bowls with the bread/cake/cement mixture we saw a dead rat in the path! Hooray! (But it wasn’t the BIG rat.) From the smell there are more like it down at the basement entry. Hopefully the new bait will smell as good to the rest of the rats as it does to me. I also bought some shrimp flavored Knorr cubes as a further taste treat if needed. We also found a plug-in rat repellant so we can try that too though of course it doesn’t solve the problem, it only (hopefully) sends them elsewhere. I’m not quite ready to leave the window glass open at night, though.

July 4, 2009

The rats seem to have vanished. We have had no more nocturnal visitors, we no longer hear them in the daytime and we haven't seen any at night either. We no longer find their droppings all over the yard, and we have barbecued a couple of times with no visitors! I gues the cement and bread crumbs did the trick. We recently got new neighbors who cleaned up a big pile of old cans and rubbish in their yard so we hope things will stay calm.

Unfortunately, the new mama cat died a couple of weeks ago. We think she died of poisoning because she died rather suddenly and we know other neighbors use rat poison. With three growing kittens she had been very busy hunting. Her three kittens were under the roof next door. We tried to catch them but only got one which died shortly afterwards. (They hide deep under the roof and we can't get at them.) We thought maybe all three had eaten of the same poison rat but suprisingly the other two have survived. They are very shy and startle easily. We have been putting food out 2-3 times a day and when all is quiet we can sometimes see them come out and eat. Fortunately no one has yet moved into the next door apartment on that side so we can go through there every day to put food on the roof. But we haven't figured out how to get them. I hope they will eventually be willing to come into our yard.

More rats!

The war goes on. The day after the last post a mama cat came by. We quickly fed her and she decided that was cool and has now been regularly hanging around part of the day. This immediately decreased the day time rat sightings at least. But mama cat goes off to her kittens for long periods too and I think the rats have figured out her schedule. Two nights ago I was looking out my 2nd floor window and saw three BIG rats snooping around down below. I fleetingly wondered if they would ever get so hungry as to climb the walls and get in thru the kitchen window but was too sleepy to get worked up about it. But the next morning I saw that they had indeed climbed in through the kitchen window! They’d enlarged a spot where the screen was starting to pull away from the frame. They had eaten half of two mangoes and a sweet potato! Now I began to get worked up!

We put out a mixture of bread and cracker crumbs mixed with cement that night. We taped the screen. We moved some junk away from beneath the window that we thought they had climbed up. We set the TUFFCAT traps on the window sill. We tried to close the jalousie windows but since they hadn’t been closed in about 10 years they were stuck open. We dripped sewing machine oil on the screw thingies and managed to get two sections working the but the third was obstinately stuck open.

Yesterday morning there was no evidence that the rats had gotten in. But this morning they obviously had gotten in, we lost a couple bananas and another sweet potato. Unfortunately the rats do not like my mixture of cement and cracker crumbs. (Only the cockroaches and ants liked it.)

Luckily for us, the owner’s handyman showed up this morning to work on one of the empty apartments. He had enough extra screening to change our holey one. He also was able to get the third window to close. So now we are feeling a bit more hopeful about keeping the rats out tonight! Very good timing too as today was market day and we have a whole new supply of fruit and vegetables!

They say that if you are seeing rats in the daytime that means there are a lot of them. So there must be a lot of them because today I saw one sitting on top of a wall in the heat of the day. (Watching us?!) Unfortunately mama cat was looking hopefully at me and had her back to it. Otherwise she surely could have gotten that one!

The handyman in all seriousness advised us to not talk harshly to the rats lest they become angry and really wreak vengenace. Ha! Do the rats speak English?!

Rats!

We have been having problems with rats lately. A few weeks ago neighbors on both sides put out poison, which by the smell did kill several but it also killed a couple of the neighborhood cats who apparently caught poisoned rats staggering around before they died. So with the decreased cat population, the rats have been able to mount a major come back since they reproduce much faster than cats do.

We ourselves are down to one cat. He is the cat equivalent of an arm chair sportsman when it comes to catching rats. He loves to sit at the edge of the drain and watch them below, but when faced with two or three on his level he just wants to come inside.

What to do? Well, I don’t want to put out poison because we don’t need to thin the neighborhood cat population any more. In addition to poison, the stores offer traps and rat glue and glue boards. The idea of the rat glue is that you smear it on a board and stick some bait in the middle. When the rat comes it’ll stick to the glue. You can also buy ready made “boards” with the glue already on it. It’s the same idea as fly paper but on a grander scale. The downside is that you then get to kill it. But that’s not the only downside. Rats often get only partially trapped and will drag the glue-coated board with them sometimes great distances, sometimes smearing glue all over everything in between. We once tried it in the village. One dragged the board until he fell in some water and drowned. But the worst was one morning we found only a paw. No idea where it came from but several unpleasant scenarios can be imagined. I decided that even rats don’t deserve that.

There are wire cage type traps but you are then stuck with killing the rat and getting it back out of the cage in whatever order you can make work. What I really wanted was an old fashioned spring loaded rat trap that kills the thing right off. After visiting 4 hardware stores, however, it seems there is a big demand right now and they were all out of stock. Finally we found something called TUFFCAT rat trap.

The TUFFCAT rat trap is a plastic gizmo a bit bigger than a computer mouse but otherwise very similar in shape. It’s easy to set and load the bait. So we tried it.

But,

Below you can see a rat sneering at our TUFFCAT. His buddy is just out of view.


Here he is eating the bait.

The trap did eventually spring but all it accomplished was to startle the rats. They came back later to see if any of the bait got dropped.

So I guess we have to try something else.

Someone once told me that plaster of Paris is a way to kill rats without endangering cats, dogs, and birds. You simply mix it in dry food. Unlike cats, dogs and people, rats can’t vomit and the stuff apparently hardens inside and kills them. Now if I can figure out what plaster of Paris is called around here...

Update on the Tree

Here's our poor butchered tree now 2 months later. Due to lots of sun and rain, it has a lush covering of leaves again. Someday this stick tree will again be lovely.

The birds are already back, bathing in the cat's drinking water again. (They don't sit still for me to get a good photo because they are in constant motion flipping and fanning their tails in all directions!)