Andy brought the truck in to the shop for its yearly maintenance yesterday, and the bill was an extra $158.39 to remove a rodent’s nest from between the inner and outer front fenders. They had to take the fenders apart, and they said they must have removed “a bale of hay” from the area. They also said Andy was lucky it didn’t catch on fire when he was driving down. They may have exaggerated a bit, but it’s not our first problem with rodents. Once we had to replace all of the wiring in our little tractor because someone (a mouse?) had stripped all the insulation. And a mouse tried to make a home in the air conditioner of our Jeep once, and a porcupine ate holes in our wooden shed and was working on the tires of our Suburban when we caught him in the act, and ….
The good news this time is the vegetation and wildlife are back!
That is a very interesting story. My father had similar problems with his car when he lived on a farm for many years, and it became routine for one of the farm workers to check the engine compartment periodically to prevent exactly this from happening. He however had not taken that precaution with the boot and mice built nice homes there till found out.
Yes, the poor creatures are just trying to build themselves a home. Nature is seldom kind.
Porcupines chew up our wooden covers we put over the downstairs windows in our cabin so the snow piles won’t break the glass. They don’t eat the wood; they like the taste of the glue in the plywood.
We had a rat stripping the leaves off the bushes in the garage. (A section of the garage is open to the sky & has bushes. Used to be a tree.) We found his nest & it was BEAUTIFUL! 🙂 He’d used many colors of scrap fabric I was storing in the garage.
That’s why the porcupines loved our shed — the yummy plywood.
Tom put heavy screen on the edges of the plywood which solved the problem.