I don't particularly like spiders - which probably goes back to seeing my adoptive Dad sweep what he called a "Christmas spider", a brightly coloured and hairy monster that was almost as wide as the broom Dad was gently wielding, out the back door. The closest I've ever seen to that spider since then was a bird eating spider from Papua New Guinea, but we were in Melbourne, about 3 - 4,000 km away, so I'm fairly sure it wasn't that. Primary school me was very reassured that Dad had a name for it - I assumed it was something he'd come across in the wilds of Queensland . . . but then again, we'd also had a death adder in our backyard that my (adoptive) sister was building mud castles around and singing to - that was almost surely someone's "pet" that had escaped. (Mum - also from Queensland - dealt with it . . . "briskly".)
Going back to spiders, when we were camping in a caravan park at a regatta, we found a particularly nasty and aggressive spider early one morning in the tent that must have got in by climbing over me the previous night. So . . . I was not a fan of spiders. [Note 1]
I've gotten better with spiders over time, and that was largely because of an ex-girlfriend in the 80s who was petrified of spiders: I'd been over to her place at many odd hours to either despatch a white tail or, if it was harmless, show her the world wouldn't end if I just gently scooped it up and took it outside. I'd learned - not as far as I had with dinosaurs, where I turned a phobia from watching "Fantasia" (complete with nightmares of T Rex's walking along the street at night, stopping at the streetlight outside our house, turning and seeing me [I hated sleeping with the blinds closed], and eating me) into an interest and then a fascination after watching Jurassic Park (I made myself watch it several times) and reading about the science, but I could co-exist with the non-venomous, less hirsute ones.
So . . . going back to that shower . . . When I finished, I left the shower cubicle door open, hoping the spider would find somewhere else to reside. On Day Three, quick look, no spi- oh, oh blast. I figured it must have been injured in the original fall (or it liked the de-stress shower gel - maybe that had helped me, too :) ), so I got a glass and piece of cardboard, scooped it up (fairly easily - it wasn't aggro), and found a really nice and inviting (I hope!) bush for it outside before having a - more relaxed and spider free - shower.
All good.
Then we come to today. I was in bed reading my infernal electronic reading device, invention of the devil and really quite handy and advantageous, having a lovely pluviophile morning (translation: it was raining), when I heard light steps and creaking above me.
I'm on the ground floor, but we have a first floor also (translation for US readers: I was on the "first" floor, and we have a second floor), and sometimes we get a few creaks and noises as the house shifts about a bit with varying humidity / pluviophile pleasure, changing temperature / sunlight, wind etc - and the wind had picked up. Also, I'm fairly sure we'd had critters in there before, but they didn't hang around for long.
However, the sounds persisted, and started to get quite frantic.
Oh.
Oh blast.
Maybe it'll go away.
No.
Oh.
What could it be? I'd heard what sounded like wings fluttering/scraping along the ceiling, so it could be . . . a vampire bat from Transylvania - no, too much sunlight between the moments of pluviophile pleasure.
It hadn't fallen through so it wasn't a hippopotamus, crocodile or elephant - although, wings, so . . . maybe Dumbo? Space was a bit small, though . . .
Is there a listing in the Yellow Pages [Note 2] for Critter Evictor? Who could I ring for help (the rest of the household was off in Queensland, probably learning how to wrangle death adders and, in advanced lessons, Christmas spiders [Note 3])?
Hang on - I'd just spend three days showering with a spider before I evicted it. Maybe I should have a go.
I thought about the sounds I was hearing. The claws meant it wasn't a snake (don't laugh at that one: kookaburras will fly to a height with a snake and drop it to kill it before they have a similar-to-but-not-eel feast {Note 4]), and the scrabbling had gone on too long for it to be a snake's prey.
OK, how the hell do I get in there? What was it? I got a small dental mirror and put it up through an air conditioning duct with a torch nearby, but couldn't see anything (so not Dumbo or mini-Dumbo . . . sigh - hey, who wouldn't want to help Dumbo?).
Extract step ladder from garage, closer look and see screws holding grate in; choose screwdriver from nice set my partner's other partner had bought recently, remove grate, put torch in, and . . . still couldn't see anything - well, I could see the space between the ground (US tr.: "first") floor ceiling and the floor of the first (US tr.: "second") floor, but . . . no critters.
Hmm. Could hear scrabbling still, so - ah! It was stuck in the wall cavity!
That would explain why it wasn't getting out again, and I couldn't get anywhere to look into cavity. It clearly didn't have enough room or purchase to get out, and couldn't spread its wings.
OK, what next?
I couldn't see so trying to physically get it out somehow was likely to injure it (I even contemplated trying tongs, but that would have been disastrous). The sound of wings meant it wasn't a possum or a rat. It seemed to have calmed down with the light from my torch, so I retired to contemplate the matter.
It needed purchase, so first attempt was to cut a sock in half, wrap it around a strut, and drop the other end into the cavity.
Quiet.
I think it took the sock as a nest, and used it to recover from the cold.
Hmm.
Also, the sock was vertical, which probably didn't help anything.
Next effort was to put a piece of timber that I had notched to provide grip into the cavity - and I could feel the bird as I did so - gently!
Withdraw.
More quiet.
Hmm.
OK, it would be feeling poorly after the trauma - especially having been in the dark for so long, so I dropped some crumbs into the cavity, showed it a piece a bread that I sat at the top, partly hanging over the cavity, then withdrew.
By now I was also thinking about what would happen when it got out of the cavity - and this is being written by the woman who, as a senior engineer, co-opted a couple of junior engineers to help her herd a trapped bird out of an underground work car park.
I secured our (strictly indoor only) cat in a room, opened the back door, and stood on the side of the opening opposite to the back door, and made anthropomorphically encouraging noises - which helped me no end. Despite that, the bird evidently got out of the cavity - I took a peek, and could see a very black beak - I had the impression of a young crow, but crows are too clever to get caught like that. After it had eaten the offerings, it dropped out through the opening, saw the open back door, and took off at close to the sound barrier.
Phew.
After that, it was just a matter of removing the torch (the timber and sock can stay there), getting the step ladder out of the way, and writing this - and the writing has been, if I discount the dithering and the waiting, longer than the doing. (The glimpse of its rapidly disappearing nether regions, combined with the beak, suggest it may have been an Indian Mynah - which is an introduced pest . . . oh well, I couldn't leave it like that no matter what it was. PS - Mynah's have orange beaks, so it wasn't one of those: we think now it may have been a blackbird)
Now, back to my reading :)
(When everyone is home, we'll have to work out how the bird got in, but I've done enough for this day of my long service leave.)
Notes
- Stop reading if you have a spider phobia: I helped a bloke (US tr.: "guy") build a 30' (translation for Aussies: ~9 - 10 m [sailing hasn't metricated as quickly as the rest of Australia] ) Roberts yacht out of glass reinforced plastic (GRP - generally referred to as "fibreglass", but that is actually a brand name) for a while one summer in Queensland. Part of that involved carrying rolls of mat up a ladder to the working platform, spreading it, rolling the resin on, and carrying the empty rolls back down. On one occasion when I was carrying an empty cardboard roll down, holding the ladder with one hand and the roll on my shoulder with the other, a big spider came out of the end of the roll and came charging at me, using the cardboard roll as an echo chamber to imitate the charge of the light brigade in a disturbingly effective psychological ploy. I could jump from the ladder, inevitably hurting myself, or flick the roll to test the spider's flight / parachute characteristics - which, as it turned out, were poor. The spider was around 6 or 7 centimetres (US tr.: 2 - 3") in size, and . . . didn't look friendly, we both agreed later.
- I'll explain what paper books and landlines and the Yellow Pages are to you some other time, kiddies.
- Actually no, it was a family wedding.
- I ate snake on one of my work trips to China - I knew it was snake, but my hosts said it was eel until I challenged them on that after I'd eaten it (I drew the line at fried scorpion). Snakes are something else I am less wary of, but err on the side of apologising profusely and backing away, as I am never too sure whether they're the poisonous sort or not (except for death adders, taipans and red-bellied blacks, which I know are Not Good). If it is a large green python sunning itself on a single lane of bitumen in Queensland that stretches from the edge of one shoulder of the road to the opposite bitumen edge and half way back (around 6 m) that is thicker than the ground clearance on my small car, I will drive slowly carefully and apologetically around it (when I looked back in the rear vision mirror it was wriggling off the road - startled, but uninjured). My fear of snakes was actually started when my (adoptive) grandfather idiotically prodded a carpet snake that was almost three times his height (so 12 - 14', say ~4m) until it wound up aggro. (Yes, that was in Queensland.)
Copyright © Kayleen White, 2019 (where this date is different to the year of publication, it is because I did the post some time ago and then used the scheduling feature to delay publication) I take these photographs and undertake these writings – and the sharing of them – for the sake of my self expression. I am under no particular illusions as to their literary or artistic merit, and ask only that any readers do not have any undue expectations. If you consider me wrong, then publish me – with full credit and due financial recompense, of course :)
