You Can't Make This Stuff Up!

They say that you cause bad things to happen by thinking about them. I'm superstitious enough to actually believe that. I'm not the type that sits around thinking of bad stuff---and even if I was, I couldn't even imagine the story I am about to relate. It could only happen to us. 

You know how we have a love/hate relationship and have been battling the assorted wildlife in our backyard? It's a dream to have assorted animals stopping by--until they cause so much damage, that you resort to any measures to get rid of them. We've certainly had our share---skunks, oppossums (had to hire "Critter Ridder" to get rid of the families that had taken up residence under our house), mice, chipmunks (that are currently digging in the planters next to my front door and making a huge dirt mess on the porch every day), squirrels (recently causing us $1000 worth of damage to our roof which caused the ceiling in our bathroom to leak which had to be replaced along with the insulation which then caused the entire ceiling to have to be repainted---and ate the $100's of dollars worth of bulbs I had planted), not to mention the moles, voles, and ground hog (wood chuck---same thing) that has caused immeasurable damage to our yard and dislodged ALL the stepping stones in my shade garden, the deer (that ate all the thyme I planted between said stepping stones), doves (that built nests in the eves and crapped all over the place until I painted the ceiling blue to deter them), the chickadees (that build nests in my hanging wall planters dis-lodiging all the dirt until my plants die) and last but not least, the rabbits that eat every vegetable I've tried to plant (with help from the squirrels and birds)!!

Well, now we have a problem that I couldn't even imagine could be possible.

Remember this picture I posted a couple of months ago? This is the fish pond I put on our patio 15 years ago. When I took this shot in March, we had about 12 or 14 goldfish that had made it through the winter. Of those, we had about 4 or 5 that were a couple years old and getting to be about 4 inches long. Butch had them trained to come up for food when we neared the pond. On Monday, Margarita started telling me a story---pantomiming---about a large animal that she saw at the pond. I thought she was talking about the ground hog until she did the flying motion. By the size she indicated with her hands, I thought it had to be a turkey vulture---we have a lot of those around here, but I've never seen them in our yard. That wasn't it. Here it is:

What the??? Are you kidding me? A friggin' blue heron in our backyard?? At our pond??? It's not like we live near a big lake or something. The reason that we know it's this particular bird was that Butch saw it in my knot garden on Saturday. He was as baffled as I am. And this is what it did....

 

We only have about 4 fish left. Again, what the??? It was just out flying around (they have a six foot wing-span) and honed in on our dinky little pond? Are we jinxed or what? Like I said, I couldn't even have imagined this. Now what the heck do we do about it?

It's not a bird, but we saw this crawling on the front porch. It's creepy looking---don't know what those white things are on its back. It's about 3 inches long. Of course, I want to kill everything, but Mindy freaked when I suggested it, so we let it go. It's probably a baby something that's going to grow up to destroy something else around here. Butch thinks it'll turn in to some sort of moth. Yeah, right, the wicker furniture cushion eating type.

Found this "belly-up" in the family room. I think it's a stink bug, but didn't smash it to find out.  It's pretty big---body about the size of a quarter in length. I hope that doesn't mean we have a family inside the house now. That would be just our luck. 

Like I said, you just can't make this stuff up.