what's cooking?

My fellow blogger Bun Karyudo posted a great blog this week!  It gave me the inspiration for my post.

Here is his take on pigeons:

http://bunkaryudo.com/pigeon-post/

It made me think about those pesky things. We had a LOT of pigeons in Orange county, CA-here in AZ though-mainly:  huge black birds, owls, vultures, hawks, morning doves, yellow and red birds of some sort, plain old wrens and at night BATS.  No pigeons!  Either way, I'm one of those people who do not like birds.

That doesn't mean I want anything bad to happen to them though.  I'm a real softy when it comes to other living creatures-even ones I don't care for at all.  Especially for ones that fly-EEK!!!  Just ask my older grandsons how I looked and got through a butterfly showing at a museum in NYC-it was NOT pretty.  I was a sweaty, nervous Nellie.


Because of Bun's wonderful post, which I encourage you to go "click" on the link and then read, I thought about an awful encounter with one I had last summer.  I cried and had nightmares for a while because of that little fellow.

In the summer our temps average about 110 from now until the end of September, sometimes longer-and with that heat and the rising temps in the accompanying garbage cans we have a horrible fly problem!

To help with that disgusting problem we use fly traps.  There are a few different versions:  bags of water with some kind of stinky clear solution that lures the pests into them where they obviously drown and die.  The Ziploc bag with a couple of pennies in it that is SUPPOSED to scare them away because the flies are afraid of the glare (it didn't work for us) and then there are the fly strips.

This blog is about the last (and worst) of these products.

Since the bags of stinky fluid reeked and made me cry about the agony the flies were in during their final moments, Steve tried the "penny" bags (which again didn't work).  The last thing we tried were the strips.

They still seemed rather violent to me, but I also don't like flies swarming in the house and creating maggots in my trash cans despite the ziplocked bags of trash that have been frozen and discarded the night before trash day.

So Steve hung the strip up and the thing not only "caught" flies-it caught a bird!!!

I heard the poor thing crying and I cried.  I let the dog out and heard it bellowing for help.  I cried and begged Steve to come and "rescue" it.

Let me assure you, it never had a chance.  I cried, had nightmares and alerted everyone on my facebook page and my Twitter feed NOT to buy those horrible killers of wildlife.

While birds may not be my favorite thing I certainly never wanted even one little feather on them to be hurt-let alone stuck and its life shortened just to keep the real pests out of my kitchen.

My best suggestion is:  DO NOT BUY PEST STRIPS!!!

This year, I guess we'll go back to the stinky bags-not the best remedy, but at least I won't be grossed out or having nightmares about our feathered neighbors.