Tag Archives: squirrels

Costa Rica: Alajuela’ve a time

We arrived at our hotel in Costa Rica late in the afternoon. After resting briefly, we walked to the bank nearby and got some cash, and then walked down the street in search of food. We arrived at a restaurant called Las Delicias del Maiz. The sign said “restaurante tipico”, which is the phrase to look for if you want to try Costa Rican food. I ordered a random platter without meat, and Horchata.

Costa Rican food

After a few years of living in Texas, what arrived wasn’t entirely unfamiliar. Clockwise from top left there’s guacamole, queso fresco, pico de gallo, some corn tortillas, black beans, a fried plaintain, and some scrambled egg. The big difference from Mexican food, at least as found in Austin, is that there wasn’t any spice applied. Being a “When in Rome…” kind of person, I ate Costa Rican food quite a lot while we were there, and after a few days the blandness did start to get to me. When we got home the first thing I did was eat curry for three days in a row.

The hotel reception breakfast buffet the next morning was more to my taste: pineapple, papaya, bananas, and fresh coffee from Doka Estate got me started. I think it was the first time I’d ever enjoyed hotel coffee without needing to sugar it. Normally in US hotels, even coffee from the mini in-room drip machines is vicious stuff.

Hotel reception

The hotel reception

We decided to head into town, as I wanted to get a prepaid SIM card. The hotel was just off route 3, which has several bus services into Alajuela. I’m not exactly sure how many, because like many things in Costa Rica, it’s all a bit uncertain. There didn’t appear to be anything like an actual bus schedule or route map, even when we got to the terminus. The buses do have signs indicating their destination, but that’s all the help you get. They stop at bus shelters, major landmarks, and other random completely unmarked locations.

A red bus went past, followed by a bus airbrushed in a Nordic Viking theme with wolves. The hotel receptionist had suggested that the green bus was a safe bet, so we waited for that one. It arrived soon enough, and was crowded with a random selection of locals, ranging from an ultra-fashionable young woman with her iPhone, to an old lady with a big shopping bag, to an apparently unattended boy about 10 years old.

The route went past a supermarket called Mega Super, where we got off and bought a couple of random essential items. As we waited for the next bus, a kindly old lady wandered past and decided that since we were obviously tourists, she should warn us about the danger of bag snatchers.

One thing I’ve noticed about traveling the world is that pretty much anywhere you go, people will regale you with dire warnings about how terrible the crime is. With a few rare exceptions, the warnings always seem to be wildly overblown. Maybe it’s different in peak tourist season, but I didn’t see any evidence of cars being broken into, bags snatched, or tourists robbed at knifepoint. The only real evidence of crime I saw was graffiti. Some of the banks had armed guards, but then that’s standard practice in many nations.

Near bus station

Street cleaner

Musical performance

If you did want to pickpocket, Alajuela’s narrow crowded Saturday morning streets would be a good place to do it. The place was a riot of sounds, colors and smells. After sorting out the whole SIM card thing, we gradually made our way towards the center of town, and found ourselves in a beautiful park. Families were relaxing and children were playing. Suddenly I noticed that some of the children were standing around a large tree—they were feeding squirrels!

Costa Rican squirrel madness

Costa Rican squirrels look much like gray squirrels in shape, but their coloration is completely different. Some had stripes, some had heads that were a different color from their bodies—there didn’t seem to be any standard pattern. The pigeons were just the same as any North American or English pigeon, though.

Pigeons can be fun

After wandering the streets at random for a while longer, we started heading back to the bus depot. On the way we stopped off at the big central indoor market, which reminded me of similar markets found in San Antonio, except crammed into a much smaller space. A couple of empanadas hit the spot, and the GPS led us back to the bus we needed for our return trip.

RIP Black Tip

Our sick squirrel friend was spotted out front, under the fig tree, around mid-day. We looked for him when we got home, but couldn’t find him until just now. At some point in the afternoon he apparently came back to our back deck, settled in his makeshift nest of leaves under the steps, went to sleep, and never woke up.

Somehow I had always assumed that he would disappear one day and not be seen again, or that we’d find him flattened by a car–but I guess he was too smart for that. It looks like what finished him off was a simple paw injury that got badly infected.

I dug a hole at the bottom of the garden, under the roots of what he always considered to be his tree. We buried him with some sunflower seeds and a couple of peanuts–and also a feather from each parakeet, symbolizing that after years of hand-feeding he was almost more of a pet than a wild animal. I made a marker from some bamboo.

So it’s finally over.

Yeah, I know, we’re crazy animal people.

On a positive note, our two local female squirrels are visiting again. One of them looks to be pregnant. Also back is Nutsy, the male with the huge nuts. Perhaps in time one of them will take over Black Tip’s territory, or maybe one of their offspring will. I don’t know that any of them will ever eat out of my hand, though.

Home improvements part 2: Guttering

As mentioned in part one, it rains heavily in Austin. I noticed during the first couple of winters that water would pour in sheets off of the front and back roofs, and pound onto the steps up to the decks. It wasn’t long before the paint in the splash zones peeled away. I sanded down, primed, and repainted, and a year later it had been pounded away again.

The problem wasn’t hard to diagnose: the house had no guttering, and the shape of the roof was basically funneling water towards the deck roofs, and hence to the decks themselves–and particularly the steps. So fixing the front deck wasn’t going to be a permanent fix unless I did something about the lack of guttering.

Our house is surrounded by trees, and I’ve seen our neighbor fighting to clean leaves from the guttering attached to the garage. Our house has two stories, and I had no desire to climb 7m ladders on a regular basis, so some sort of leaf-proof guttering was a priority.

The garage gutter had grilles that were supposed to prevent leaves from clogging things up, but squirrels pulled them out in search of acorns. I know for a fact that squirrels wander across our roof, as I hear their footsteps sometimes in the mornings, so that wasn’t going to be a solution.

I eventually settled on LeafGuard gutters. They are made from a continuous piece of extruded recycled aluminium; a truck comes to your house with a big roll of proto-gutter in the back, and it’s cut and shaped to fit your house. The only joins are at the roof corners. The gutters are extra wide, to carry a higher volume of water, and nothing obstructs the trough, so any debris that does get in can be washed out. There’s a lifetime warranty: if they somehow clog up, you call and someone comes and fixes them.

Costco sells LeafGuard, and arranged for a salesman to visit. He demonstrated the system and I got to check out how it dealt with large amounts of water from a garden hose. It turned out that as well as the standard colors, they had a red color available via special order, which would almost exactly match the red trim on the house.

That was the good news. The bad news was that even via Costco, custom fitted gutters are expensive.

I didn’t just want gutters, either. Once spring is over, you have to somehow preserve your garden through the long, brutal Texas summer. Even with xeriscaping, last year’s drought was tough on the front yard. I wanted to collect the rainwater so I could use it for watering.

Lowes and Home Depot had rainbarrels–made of plastic. As well as looking ugly, I was confident that they would perish after a few years. There was no indication that they were even recycled plastic. So it was off to the web once more, where I located Austin Green Water. They sold rain harvesting units made from recycled metal barrels, with proper brass fittings, mesh to keep out mosquitos, and a wooden stand. I ordered two units, each with two 200 liter barrels.

The barrels were delivered and in place by the time the gutters were ready to be fitted, so the guys who installed the gutters made sure the downspouts were directed into the barrels.

So: two new decks, two new sets of leaf-proof squirrel-proof gutters, two sets of rainbarrels, special industrial rubber sealant, many man-days of work, and finally all was well once again. Nature obliged with two last storms to test everything out before summer proper, so we should now have enough rainwater to keep our plants happy until fall.

Now all I need to do is recover from the credit card bill.

Year of the click beetle

It seems as though each year, a different kind of Texas wildlife undergoes a population explosion and decides to visit our house.

We had the year of the woods roach. That was pretty unpleasant. The year of the junebugs wasn’t much better, because the dead ones got everywhere and looked disconcertingly like dry-roasted peanuts. There was the year of the snail invasion; that one mostly troubled our neighbors. Much cuter was the year of the eight squirrels, and the year of the geckos was nice too.

This year seems to be the year of the click beetles. Last night one got itself jammed in the laundry basket, and kept me awake clicking against it until I moved the basket out into the hallway.

Cute / not cute

On Sunday, I was sitting in the living room when one of our female squirrels came to the back door and tapped on the glass to ask for food.

Entirely too cute, so by way of balance here’s a cockroach story:

This morning rothko found a cockroach in her shoulder bag. So of course, she immediately said "Eww! Roach!" and tipped it out onto the living room floor, at which point it retreated to under the sofa. I decided I might be able to get it, but I’d only have a single chance, so I fetched the Dyson. Sure enough, when I moved the sofa it scuttled towards the exercise machine, but the vacuum did the job. My intention had been to release the insect outside, but it turns out that a 1000km/h cyclone leads to incipient cockroach moribundity.

At this time of year they mostly creep in under the front door in search of water. Three this year, which seems to be about the usual number.

Update: I spoke too soon. This evening I noticed Chester staring intently at something in the bottom of his cage…

Squirrel detector

I realized that I hadn’t spent enough quality time watching squirrels recently. Black Tip would sit on the fence and wait for me to put food out, but we haven’t seen him in a while, and the new youngsters are shy.

On Sunday I was idly browsing the tool store when I saw they had a special on wireless motion sensor alarms, the kind you can mount on your driveway and hear a beep when someone approaches the house. I figured I’d risk $12 to see if one could detect a squirrel. Cheap Chinese-made crap, but it’s not for actual security use, so who cares?

Opening up the box revealed an infra-red sensor and transmitter unit, and a receiver with some apparently superfluous LEDs, both battery powered. The “chime” is a harsh beep, and I’m not sure how much I’d trust the claim of a 400′ range, but for this application it’s fine.

The sensor/transmitter is now on the rat mat, and the receiver is in the living room. When a squirrel approaches to chow, the receiver beeps and we can walk to the back door to watch. Since there’s no sound from the sensor, the squirrel doesn’t get frightened off. As far as they know, we’re just spending a lot more time at the back of the house.

I’m now wondering how hard it would be to get it hooked up to trigger a camera…

Spy squirrels captured in Iran

Quote:

According to IRNA, the official Islamic Republic news agency, the national Police chief has implicitly verified the news about the confiscation of a number of squirrels, equipped with eavesdropping devices, on the Iranian borders. He has declined to give any more details, but, reportedly, when asked about the confiscation of 14 spy squirrels, he stated, “I have heard about it, but I do not have precise information”. IRNA adds, “These squirrels were equipped by foreign intelligence services, but were captured two weeks ago by the Police”.

Life imitates Flickr?

Breakthrough

It has taken a long time and lots of nuts, but today it finally happened: our local alpha squirrel, Black Tip, took a peanut out of my fingers.

I’m wondering if the other squirrels watching him have the intellectual capacity to reason that they can do it too, or whether I’ll need to train them separately.