pests

Last night I spent a thoroughly amusing evening listening to a lecture on bed bugs.  And rats, mice, flies and foxes.  It was the monthly meeting of the beekeepers, and one of our members agreed to share selected highlights of his thirty years working as a pest controller.

It was a virtuosic performance.  He spoke for three quarters of an hour, which the lecturer in child development when I was a student declared to be the maximum length for a lecture.  Any more than that and your audience's attention begins to flag.  He had no slides and no notes, simply stood at the front of the room in a village hall, weight slightly tipped on to the balls of his feet so that he looked alert, and told us stories.  Occasionally, to make sure that we were awake and paying attention, he threw questions out to the audience.  I have had much less fun in lectures by academics and professionals who were qualified to lecture, and did so for a living, rather than dealing with unwanted rodents for their day job.

The pest controller's definition of a pest was rather like a gardener's of a weed, that is a creature in the wrong place.  Mice in the hedgerow fine, mice in a food processing plant bad news.  With the added similarity that pests, like weeds, tend to reproduce rapidly and thrive in close proximity to humans.  I guess we all enjoyed hearing about them because people at some level generally enjoy the yuk factor, things which are disgusting but are not happening to us.  Plus most of us had suffered from pests of some sort, squirrels in the thatch if not bed bugs.

If you trap a squirrel you are legally obliged to kill it.  It is an offence to release it back into the wild, though you can trap and release mice, moles and foxes.  The pest controller did not tell us how to kill a squirrel humanely, though I know that drowning it in the water butt is inhumane and doing so is an offence.  I made a mental note not to trap any squirrels.  If you can work out how to kill your squirrel legally then it makes good eating, though difficult to skin.  You really don't want a squirrel in your loft, as it will strip the insulation off your wiring and dismantle your water tank for nesting material.

If you trap and release a mouse, it's no good taking it to the bottom of the garden, it will be back in the house before you are.  You need to take it at least two miles away.  He didn't say how far you had to take a fox.  A friend who is a wildfowler and knowledgeable about country ways disapproves of the the idea that relocating unwanted foxes is kinder than destroying them, having seen too many bewildered job lots of disoriented foxes wandering bemused with no idea of what to do in the countryside, after presumably being shipped out of town.  The pest controller once shot fourteen foxes in one night at an urban school, and four days later had to despatch another seven.  He blames human carelessness, leaving food waste lying accessible.

He sounded as though he really enjoyed being a pest controller.  It was not that he enjoyed killing things, far from it.  He tells people how to let animals escape, if that is what they are trying to do, like the ladybirds clustering in front of a window.  If someone insists the nuisance creatures must be poisoned instead of simply opening the window, he certainly enjoys charging his call out fee after he has opened the window, and whatever it is has flown out.  For every job requiring him to dismantle light switches to get at the bed bugs within, there are many more where he simply looks at a house or factory from a mouse or rat's eye view, and advises where the weak points are, that need stopping up so that they can't come in.

He didn't mention bees at all, until we got on to the Q&A.  Pest controllers do get called up on to kill colonies of wild honeybees, and bumbles, and although he always tried to persuade people to leave them be, he sometimes ended up destroying them.  Maybe he thought that would upset an audience of beekeepers, and he'd get a rough time.  He was called to one firm which had co-existed happily with a colony of feral bees they didn't know were there, until they uncovered them, at which point they became unhappy and insisted the bees had to go.  It was a big, strong colony, and the middle of a warm day when his client insisted he did the deed.  Having done as they asked, he took some pleasure in getting into his van and leaving sharply.  The foraging bees, of which there were many, were not at all pleased when they got back and found the entrance to their colony blocked (as you must do by law, to make sure robber bees don't later on take the poison back to their own hives). They were so cross, they made a complete nuisance of themselves for the rest of the day, and nobody could get to their cars.