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Our second daughter has to write a 4 weeks homework about 'crimes done by animals'. Kids should watch animals around them and write down what 'crimes' they watch and what they think is the most cruel one. Most of the kids in the class of my daughter live in a 120000 people town and do not see much wild animals. So the teacher said it would be okay if they would write about spiders in their house or if they find a pellet (? the undigested pieces a bird of prey 'eats backwards') to examine it to see which animals were the prey.

 

But we live mid in a forest, having a big garden, fish ponds, several fruit trees, ....

 

So here a short list what we got in 3 hours doing garden work at saturday without really searching for 'crimes'.

 

Hannibal Lecter, paralysed for later use

To plant some Josta-berries I was digging some holes. In one there were a lot of dead worms. My daughter asked what are there so many worms. I told her that this is the food chamber of a mole who paralyses by biting worms to eat them in hard times.

 

A genocide

We have hornets for decades in an apple tree. Some years, this year was one, wasps are building nests in our fruit trees too. The hornets are way bigger than wasps and it seems very lazy. So a hornet flies to the entry hole of the wasp nest, waits some second, catches the first appearing wasp and flies away to feed the baby hornets, next hornet is already waiting to release her... So in 3 minutes there were 4 dead wasps. I think when I return from work the wasp nest will be empty. Hornets doing a genocide.

 

Reversed roles- Eaten alive

In our pond (would be a water reservoir in case of a fire) we have several tadpoles. Rear legs are already build out. But there are killers: the larvae of dragonflies. They catch the tadpoles and eat them, even the tadpoles have double their size, while the tadpoles are still alive, bit by bit.

 

The killers from africa

Loud chirping of a pair of redstarts made us look up. They tried to enter a hole about 6 metres above ground in a big old pear tree(planted by my grand3father). My 6 year old said why are the swallows attacking the redstarts, swallows don't breed in holes (in our stall and barn we have only 2 sort of swallows: one breeding in stalls and one who glues their nests on walls below a roof). I said that it aren't swallows but swifts which look similiar and that swifts breed in tree holes and in nests at walls if the wall is high. Young swifts need a free fall line of 5 metres or more to catch enough speed if they leave the nest, they have too short feed to start from the ground if failing. We have around 30 pairs of swifts breeding below the roof of our field-barn.

What I didn't tell her but her older sister for her homework:

Swifts return always to the nest they had the year before. This year they returned late because of bad weather and the nest was already occupied by redstarts. Swifts would normally try to throw eggs and nestlings of other birds out of the nest they are used too. But swifts are very short legged and the hole was very deep so they failed. If they fail to do it they make a new nest bottom, using clay and their saliva. So the nestlings of the redstarts were trapped behind an airtight new bottom and using their last breath to chirp for help and the swifts preventing this.

What could be more cruel?

 

My older daughters weren't believing me so I showed them the same tree part with a hole my dad was showing me: The hole was cut in halves so you could see it: top bottom was an old nest from a woodpecker, but no dead nestlings. Then dead house sparrows, swift, dead sparrows, swift, eggs of sparrows, swift, redstart , the hole was filled nearly to the top at this time and no room for a new bottom it seemed. The woodpeckers were breeding in 1953, the tree was cut 1971, so in average every 4th year the swifts were late and doing a hostile (and deadly) takeover.

 

If you are not to afraid now to leave your house, what crimes do you see?

Edited by chattius
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  • 2 weeks later...

Yesterday we saw an european hamster.

hamster.jpg

 

And there was of cause the question put by my daughters: Why has it a black belly while all the hamsters you can buy as pets have bright ones. Nearly all animals have a brighter belly than back, why not the european hamster?

 

I was smiling because I remembered that I did nearly the same question as a kid. And I gave the same answer:

I put up a Kaspertheater (puppet theatre) from our store room. I think you call them Punch and Judy. Funny video with Elvis playing in a Kaspertheatre and singing.

 

I used adhesive tape to make a brown glove black on the palm. I did white tape around the finger tips, exept the middle finger. I put a little head on this finger. Then I darkened the room and joked a bit with Kasper (the hero puppet), Gretel (his love) and the crocodile (the normal enemy). But this time the crocodile seemed to win, when suddenly the Hamster appeared. He stood up raising his forelegs and roared.

And then it was obvious: the black fur looked like an open fang and the 4 feet like canine teeth, ready to kill the attacker.

 

Sadly there are almost no wild hamsters around anymore, (there are tries of repopulation in our district, and I guess the hamster we saw was one of them). In germany they were nearly extincted in the post war years 1945-47 when germany suffered from war and a mis-harvest. People learned quickly that the food store/cache of a hamster could hold up to 100 pound of grain or fruits and dug them out. My grandpa told me when I was young how to look for hamster stores, just in case.

Edited by chattius
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Can you really call it a "crime" when the animal has no sense of wrong, just doing what is natural and necessary.

 

On the other hand have you never watched a cat playing with it's prey?

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Our second daughter has to write a 4 weeks homework about 'crimes done by animals'. Kids should watch animals around them and write down what 'crimes' they watch and what they think is the most cruel one. Most of the kids in the class of my daughter live in a 120000 people town and do not see much wild animals. So the teacher said it would be okay if they would write about spiders in their house or if they find a pellet (? the undigested pieces a bird of prey 'eats backwards') to examine it to see which animals were the prey.

 

But we live mid in a forest, having a big garden, fish ponds, several fruit trees, ....

 

So here a short list what we got in 3 hours doing garden work at saturday without really searching for 'crimes'.

 

Hannibal Lecter, paralysed for later use

To plant some Josta-berries I was digging some holes. In one there were a lot of dead worms. My daughter asked what are there so many worms. I told her that this is the food chamber of a mole who paralyses by biting worms to eat them in hard times.

 

A genocide

We have hornets for decades in an apple tree. Some years, this year was one, wasps are building nests in our fruit trees too. The hornets are way bigger than wasps and it seems very lazy. So a hornet flies to the entry hole of the wasp nest, waits some second, catches the first appearing wasp and flies away to feed the baby hornets, next hornet is already waiting to release her... So in 3 minutes there were 4 dead wasps. I think when I return from work the wasp nest will be empty. Hornets doing a genocide.

 

Reversed roles- Eaten alive

In our pond (would be a water reservoir in case of a fire) we have several tadpoles. Rear legs are already build out. But there are killers: the larvae of dragonflies. They catch the tadpoles and eat them, even the tadpoles have double their size, while the tadpoles are still alive, bit by bit.

 

The killers from africa

Loud chirping of a pair of redstarts made us look up. They tried to enter a hole about 6 metres above ground in a big old pear tree(planted by my grand3father). My 6 year old said why are the swallows attacking the redstarts, swallows don't breed in holes (in our stall and barn we have only 2 sort of swallows: one breeding in stalls and one who glues their nests on walls below a roof). I said that it aren't swallows but swifts which look similiar and that swifts breed in tree holes and in nests at walls if the wall is high. Young swifts need a free fall line of 5 metres or more to catch enough speed if they leave the nest, they have too short feed to start from the ground if failing. We have around 30 pairs of swifts breeding below the roof of our field-barn.

What I didn't tell her but her older sister for her homework:

Swifts return always to the nest they had the year before. This year they returned late because of bad weather and the nest was already occupied by redstarts. Swifts would normally try to throw eggs and nestlings of other birds out of the nest they are used too. But swifts are very short legged and the hole was very deep so they failed. If they fail to do it they make a new nest bottom, using clay and their saliva. So the nestlings of the redstarts were trapped behind an airtight new bottom and using their last breath to chirp for help and the swifts preventing this.

What could be more cruel?

 

My older daughters weren't believing me so I showed them the same tree part with a hole my dad was showing me: The hole was cut in halves so you could see it: top bottom was an old nest from a woodpecker, but no dead nestlings. Then dead house sparrows, swift, dead sparrows, swift, eggs of sparrows, swift, redstart , the hole was filled nearly to the top at this time and no room for a new bottom it seemed. The woodpeckers were breeding in 1953, the tree was cut 1971, so in average every 4th year the swifts were late and doing a hostile (and deadly) takeover.

 

If you are not to afraid now to leave your house, what crimes do you see?

 

What an amazing read... chattius how do you do this,how do you have the coolest information inside your head like this! :girl_sigh: I can just imagine the hugely real, and earthy education peeps get from living in real world ecologies like this. My parents did, but my brother and I grew up in urban unk. :yay:

 

And not only all this astonishing information life in the country side...but the context you placed it in regarding crimes... bravo

 

Crimes against Nature... the new CSI... someone needs to make a show!

 

:bye:

 

gogo

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@Bondbug: That was exactly the reason why I put crime in ''. And yes cats were farmers long before humans. It seems they catch mice only to populate the barn with more mice to be prepared for a winter with a lot of snow and they not able to hunt mice outside.

 

@gogo: Well obviously the teacher had the idea by creating this sort of homework. If you grew up with a single TV for 20 people and no computers you did games with your siblings like: how many diffrent birds you see, how many nests you see, ....

My nephew in munich counts diffrent car brands with his friends, so the curiosity is there in kids, it is just focused on diffrent things.

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That was exactly the reason why I put crime in ''. And yes cats were farmers long before humans. It seems they catch mice only to populate the barn with more mice to be prepared for a winter with a lot of snow and they not able to hunt mice outside.

 

 

This totally makes sense. And its job security.

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  • 5 months later...

Hundreds of scorpions in our kitchen:

 

dsc_0134_2_l.jpg

 

Next sunday is what we call Totensonntag in germany. A national silent day at which people visit the graves of the diseased. They will leave some flowers, or make the graves pretty for the coming winter, ...

We were planing to make some hearts for graves of relatives which are too far away to visit them every month. So we normaly take a stone which has a hole in a heart shape. Then some moss is added, wax roses, pine cones ... The stone is mainly because to add weight so the garment is not blown away by winter storms.

 

pict0046.jpg

 

We collected the moss and the cones in the forest and started to build the hearts when suddenly our third daughter cried:

 

What is running there? Answer: Skorpions!

 

To see how big the danger was: here is one who had read Douglas Adams:

 

Stubenfliege-Moosskorpion-Moosskorpion-Beige-Makrofotografie-510x510.jpg

 

See the scorpion biting the fly? It is not attacking but rather hitchhiking on a fly, using the fly as a transport to other places. We call them Moosskorpion (moss scorpions). They are no real scorpions and belong to the family of Pseudoscorpions. Our older daughters have seen them before, I showed a fly carrying 8 of them last summer. They are not rare but you have to know how to search them.

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  • 2 months later...

Car killers

 

automa_2.jpg

 

Steinmarder = stone martens caused a car crash this morning. My volunteer firefighter alarm went off 4am this morning. A car with a 19 year old girl working in a bakery crashed. She managed a sort of emergency braking by carefully hitting the side rails in a narrow angle and sliding along them to slow down. She said she was unable to brake. A quick search made it obvious that a stone marten used its teeth on most cables and pipes it could reach. But the brake hose pipe didn't seemed to be damaged (they are armoured nowadays). But the electronic was damaged a lot.

 

In central europe with areas having stone marders people do a lot of defense strategies against them:

 

100db ultra sonic noise in engine room

electro shock plates in engine room (my preferred method, because our ancient diesel has a very big battery)

smelly stuff

...

 

You have to know that it is always the second marten which does the damage. The first is marking its territory, then the car is moved into a territory of another marten. Then the second marten hunts for the first, finds nothing and does a wild biting in engine room.

So washing the engine too while doing a car wash reduce the risc. Also they seem to dislike diesel. Biting is done way less in cars with diesel engines.

I cleaned up the engine room of our cars, no loose cables or hoses, all attached close to the frame or engine, so the marten can not bite around them. Where the cables leave the cover of the car frame electro shock is installed. So I only had to protect 2 possible riscs at our ancient diesel van and 3 at the Ente (german for duck, nickname for Citroen 2CV4).

 

Are there other animals known to destroy cars in rest of the world? I know of Kea-parrots in New Zealand, are there more?

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  • 4 months later...

Wespenbussard

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2y_3OBxT42I

 

We watched a jumping shadow yesterday in the reed and sedge around the ponds. First we thought of a crow or raven, but it had a brown colour. it looked like a common buzzard, but hunting when walking is not normal for a buzzard. So we thought that it may have an injured wing. But when approaching the head of the bird was wrong. So we took the telescope, avoiding 'Bushism' and recognized that it was a Wespenbussard. Wespenbussard would translate as wasp-bussard but its english name is honey-buzzard.

 

bush-fernglas.jpg

 

2108898567-maeusebussard.9.jpg

 

Wespenbussard (1).JPG

 

The weaker honey-buzzard is often mimicrying a common buzzard at places with Habicht-Goshawks arround. So to be sure you have to look at the head. The honey-buzzard has yellow eyes, the common beige to brown. The honey-buzzard has slits as nose holes. So wasps can't sting in. We had no honey-buzzards the last 8 years in our area. Now it is a breeding pair.

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  • 1 year later...

Got a 3D-laser scanner for weekend when a nearby company didn't need it. Used it to scan tree trunks to find a fitting one for a house repair I plan/need to do in 4 years. Living in a wooden patchwork house, some of the wood parts have to be replaced after 350+ years.

The chopped wood has to ripe for some years so you can be sure that it is not 'working' (changing its shape) any more. The problem are the old techniques used at house building:

 

4674_artikel.jpg

 

Streight wood was expensive and sold to town people, curved wood was used for local house building because you needed a good eye to find trees which fit together to do a real robust patchwork pattern. Obviously I don't have the trained eye of a carpenter, so I need the scanner.

 

Same scanner is used by CSI: you build it uo, the laser head rotates and you get a 3-dimensional image of a crime scene. Houses, cars, streets, trees are made into a 3D model you can rotate and enter with a computer program.

 

Other usage is archaeology. The laser detects differences of a few milimetres in soil, hinds for former walls.

 

Luckily Leica is located at my birthtown where my parents still live.

 

http://hds.leica-geosystems.com/en/index.htm

 

Hope I find some trunks for our local historical museum too. We want to repair the ruin of an old multi-purpose stamp-mill. An exploding tank grenade did no good to it in WW2. Mill was used to hammer ores, oil seeds, ...

 

The history club (in germany were 7 people met they found a club) plans to create its own oil. Hammered/stamped oil is suffering from less heat at production, even less than cold pressing. But the amount of oil you get is less. But tests at an still existing century old mill showed that this oil has a lot more vitamins and healthy contains than cold pressed oil. We hope to sell the oil to equal the costs for running and repairing the mill.

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  • 7 months later...

Nature put a jynx on the tree hut of the kids.

A few metres above the hut a pair of wrynecks (jynx torquilla) build a nest in a tree-hole. Funny to watch the neck twisting of the birds.

 

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Nestlings mimicry a snake with this head movementm, they also do hissing sounds.

Adult birds use it sometimes to watch bark from all sides for hidden insects. They can not do brute force as their relatives the woodpeckers can do.

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A snake, that's what it reminds me of...mimicry, I love how it seems like there's an infinite kind of ways life has of getting through the day

:)

 

gogo

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  • 6 years later...

Kids found several dead mice at the horses grasing ground. They feared poison and informed us. It were dead root voles. The horses ate the plants nearly to the ground so the vole tunnels heated up and the plant roots were drying. Voles need fresh roots for their water supply. So they left their nests to search for new food. But the heat from nearly 40 Celcius and the ground to hard and dry to dig new holes: they dehydrated quickly.

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On 8/2/2019 at 8:46 AM, chattius said:

Kids found several dead mice at the horses grasing ground. They feared poison and informed us. It were dead root voles. The horses ate the plants nearly to the ground so the vole tunnels heated up and the plant roots were drying. Voles need fresh roots for their water supply. So they left their nests to search for new food. But the heat from nearly 40 Celcius and the ground to hard and dry to dig new holes: they dehydrated quickly.

Lol ... this Has got to be the best thread title ever made..  battle of the voles!

 

😎

gogo

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