(12-07-2024, 12:36 PM)F2d5thCav Wrote: Bally,
Good that you're recovering. Sounds like the American West ... scorpions etc. can get into footwear.
Cheers--
Not just the west. I live in the Appalachian Rain Forest, and there are some formidable creepy-crawlies here, too. No scorpions that I've ran across yet, but some hand-sized spiders, some mean littler spiders - like Black Widows and Brown Recluses, among others - nasty assed centipedes, and great big millipedes - harmless but ugly. I found one that had been ran over by a car to kill it. It was about 7 inches long, and bigger around than a man's thumb. Harmless, but impressive.
It's mostly the spiders and centipedes that cause me to shake out my boots every day before putting them on, and even hanging my house slippers up so the critters have a harder time finding them to get into.
I killed two hand sized spiders in the house this year - one in the kitchen sink, and one that was sitting in the living room floor giving me the hairy eyeball.
There is some kind o spider here that I don't know what it's really called, but I call them "dancing spiders", because they "roll", right and left like a spun coin settling down, when they move. They are the only ones I know of that will come after you for no good reason. When I was in my 20's, I had one chase me across the floor trying to get at me. Every time I raised my foot to squash it, it would jump as high as my knees and straight at me, so I had to scoot backwards on my feet to keep it from landing on me. I finally killed it by picking up a boot and dropping it on it exactly when it landed on the floor.
We've got these little shiny black "Parson Spiders", too. I've never seen one outdoors, only inside houses. They won't do any serious damage, but sting like a mother for a good long while if one of them nails you.
Only one snake got into the house this year - that I saw, anyhow. It was a harmless Corn Snake. Some folks call them house snakes, because in the fall when temps start dropping, they tend to try to get into houses for shelter.
We also have timber rattlers, copperheads, and water moccasins. For some strange reason i could never fathom, the last county I lived in made it illegal to kill timber ratters. My position on that is that what the government doesn't know won't hurt them when it comes to dead rattlesnakes. I've not bothered to ask if it's legal to kill them in this county, because I really don't care about the legality of it - I'm reasonably sure about the morality of it. Legality and morality don't always coincide. The biggest timber rattler I've personally seen was about 6 foot long, but I've heard credible reports of 7 and 8 footers.
We've got some nasty stuff here, too, but nothing like Australia where everything actively wants to kill you. I'm thinking of investing 20 bucks or so into a "Bug A-Salt" rifle. It's like a shotgun that fires salt instead of pellets, designed to put an end to marauding creepy-crawlies.
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