Jaws

Opening a drawer I found a fat mouse who'd shredded my gift wrap and done numbers one and two on a year's worth of greeting and birthday cards. I think only moms-to-be would be so sneaky, persistent, and destructive. They chewed through particle board into a cabinet, left piles of sunflower-seed hulls and dried beans on the mantel and in my shoes, and turds in my apron pockets. I wept. With weather cooler than normal for August I thought to bake a cake, light and not too sweet, and share it like a good Missourian, and opening the oven where pans are kept I saw enthroned in my cake pan a mouse nest clawed out of oven insulation with, fortunately, no mice in it. After my nausea passed (instead of baking, I hosed down all the pans and set the dishwasher on "sanitize"), I sent the landlord a photo and demanded he address in all seriousness the plague of mice I've had since spring. One or two in winter is normal in a country house. But five or ten in late summer, openly running along the baseboards: no. Worst in 14 years. So bad I stopped feeding the birds.

Enter Tim the handyman with the familiar blue Tomcat poison saying, "You just gotta hope they die outside," and when he set eight of these new kind of traps I wailed that these mice were too smart for traps, and he joked, "You just gotta get out the ol' .22." They're baited with a dollop of black gel -- the mice have been so bad I have two peanut butter jars, one for my mousetraps and one for me!! -- and one got caught along a major mouse thruway. With these I needn't touch the dead ones. Outside along the foundation Tim placed larger traps containing immense cakes of poison and said to refill them in two weeks. I said, there must be a hole there, why don't you find it and patch it up? Guess whose job that's gonna be.

Invasion of the Army Worms

The army worms or tent caterpillars hatched, millions of  'em. I figured they were a feast for birds, but they crawled like an army toward my house and then at lights-out in the guest room, about 2 a.m., I saw Pseudaletia unipuncta crawling all over my walls and carpeting. . . they kept advancing. . .I vacuumed up maybe 200 in all. Wondering where they found entry, I stepped outside, and the stoop and the door were PAVED with the crawly things (dropping thousands of black pinhead turds), and around my head buzzed a universe of wasps dive-bombing and eating them. Immediately I threw lime over the largest mass of worms, and then bleach, and then powdered my threshold with ground red pepper.

With a sigh I lay down in bed only to see one descending from the ceiling via a silken string. Grabbed it with a tissue. They spurt reddish-brown when crushed. (My kitchen floor looks like somebody cut an arm real good with a chef's knife.) The next morning I found a worm sharing my bed. (That's not a joke; that's literal truth.)

So shocked was I by the nighttime home invasion I didn't take many photos until this morning when I surveyed the battlefield with all the satisfaction of my ancestor Genghis Khan. Then I examined what these caterpillars had done to plants: skeletonized the leaves [see above photo], and they were still at it, so many thousands that their crunching and droppings are audible, like light rain.

When they find a suitable spot they begin growing white fuzz to cocoon themselves [photo at right], hoping to become moths in a little while. I have never ever seen an invasion of army worms like this. Their ranks also included true inchworms (thin green ones), and fat green caterpillars. I vow to fight them to my last pepper flake.