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Urban wildlife! What's the strangest animal that's wandered into your house??

Cosmicjamas

20:22 / 02.05.03

Well, sure, OK - last year we had (in order of appearance) ants, slugs, snails and finally a fieldmouse living behind the fridge. Plus squirrels and a fox in the garden.

Just now I was quietly catching up on Barbelith and I heard a small scritty sound in the corner of the room. Looked round, saw something moving and thought, oh, mouse. But no, it was...

a HEDGEHOG!!!!!!!

Well, what do you do? It's too big and spiny to swat or pick up (OMG it was enormous), you can't scream at it because it would go feral and end up panicked and anywhere in the house...so I sat and watched it. It didn't look at me (notoriously crap eyesight). I thought fetch the clay, BBQ time...it eyed up my son's remote controlled Robot Wars Matilda model and fell in love. Hmm. Luckily it walked back round the room and left by the patio door it came in. Which is now shut...!

that

20:29 / 02.05.03

Some strange cat from god knows where came in the house once. And one of our neighbourhood foxes came and looked through the glass panels of the back door for ages too. And we had a house mouse called Darth Vader when I lived in Muswell Hill.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

20:41 / 02.05.03

When I was living in Turnpike Lane we had a hedgehog once... we were all tripping, and heard this rustling sound. Turned out 'twas Mrs Tiggywinkle with her head stuck in a plastic bag. We fed her on Ginger Nuts for a couple of days (and, obviously, rescued her from the plastic bag), and kept the dogs 'n' cats away from her. Eventually, she wandered off. But she was cool, though.

Elijah, Freelance Rabbi

20:47 / 02.05.03

when i worked at a ranch and lived on the property my AC unit got pushed into the house by a horse, i came home and he ha his head in through the hole in the wall, eating fruit out of a basket on my kitchen table...

Ethan Hawke

20:51 / 02.05.03

Bats. My ex-roommate's cat, Rosa Luxembourg (I actually got to name her, for some reason), used to kill them.

Char Aina

20:57 / 02.05.03

you decide which is better; the quokkas, a marsupial native tothe island of rottnest,WA., or the poisonous mamba snake that my dad had to kill when we were in Malawi in central africa.

the quokkas are my favourite, mostly due to their enjoyment of the simpsons. i actually caught four different ones trying to watch TeeVee over my shoulder.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

21:35 / 02.05.03

Quokkas? No fair! All I've had is rats, mice, escaped gerbils and a blackbird which got lost down the flue and had to be let out from behind the gas fire. And which crapped on the curtains.

Oh, and moths got in our food cupboard back in Finsbury Park. Moths count, right?

Whisky Priestess

08:37 / 03.05.03

We used to have slugs that crawled in under the kitchen door at night and danced their wild dances over the living room carpet. Every morning we'd find intricate patterns of slime on the carpet and couldn't work out where they were coming from. And we had snails and mould in the bathroom. Mould counts, right?

Salamander

09:15 / 03.05.03

One time a purple hornless unicorn walked through my room.

The Natural Way

09:48 / 03.05.03

Slugs, mice, gerbils, squirrels, birds, hedgehogs, rats...you name it.

I once saw a scorpian on the path leading to the local ostritch/lama farm. Weird for Sussex.

Shrug

10:06 / 03.05.03

A few Field Mice, nothing special, cute little things though.

Dances with Gophers

19:07 / 03.05.03

One year Peacock Butterflys kept appearing in my bedroom, the weird thing is the windows and the door was closed. No sooner had I realesd one into the wild then another one had got in.

Hedgehogs are quite easy to pick up as long as they don't curl up and go all spikey. However I found out at an early age that it aint a good idea to try and stroke one!

Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo

19:48 / 03.05.03

http://www.newyorker.com/shouts/content/?030505sh_shouts

The Return Of Rothkoid

06:45 / 04.05.03

Skinks. And the occasional blue-tongued lizard.

Oh, and funnelwebs. You don't fuck with the funnelwebs.

Ganesh

09:03 / 04.05.03

Weirdest was a couple of years ago, when our flat was briefly besieged by around thirty or forty wasps in the middle of the night, with (I'd estimate) up to a hundred more fizzing furiously on the other side of the glass (when we worked out what was going on, we got the window closed pronto). No insect spray: in desperation, we sprayed them with houseplant aphid killer - which did the trick but slo-o-owly, so their lightbulb-circling got wider and wider, until they finally crashed in various corners. And then there was the problem of finding all the little toxin-laden waspy corpses before the cats (which were finding this all very interesting) crunched them all up.

Oh yeah, and there's the time a Bear lumbered into our Vauxhall flat, broke into hives (allergic rather than stinging insect) and lumbered out again...

fidrich

13:00 / 04.05.03

Just spiders, really. Occasionally we get these huge, monstorous ones - bigger than my hand - which need to be trapped under trophies and things because they won't fit inside cups or glasses, and everyone's too afraid to try to kill them.

that

13:56 / 04.05.03

A deathwatch beetle bit our dear departed Yorkie once in the back garden. They're an endangered species, ya know.

Bear

14:16 / 04.05.03

Har har Ganesh!

I saw a fox last night outside a pub does that count? Never really had anything strange apart from the rat that keeps visiting my room but I found where he was getting in and blocked it up.

A dog came round to the park opposite my house when I was a kid, came for the whole week and then one day it never came back - I was very sad.

When I was little I heard what I thought was the sorceress from He-men (when she was in falcon form) coming from our roof, I don't think it was her though.

I need to sleep!!

Ganesh

14:18 / 04.05.03

Did you pull the fox?

Bear

14:23 / 04.05.03

He didn't seem interested to be honest, kinda gave me a quick glance and then walked off. Story of my life - foxes are too picky.

Ganesh

14:25 / 04.05.03

Stick with hounds... shaggier, more faithful and they don't go through your bins.

gingerbop

14:33 / 04.05.03

Eugh- my ex claimed to have tried to get off with a police dog when drunk. Said it wasnt pleasant; especially with half his face missing...

knickers

09:15 / 05.05.03

When I was a young'un a pigeon failed to notice our dining-room window. Much broken glass and pigeon-blood ensued. The walls were given an interesting new blood-spatter design, and we couldn't bring ourselves to eat off the dining-room table for months...

8===>Q: alyn

09:51 / 05.05.03

My ex-girlfriend.

Spaniel

11:41 / 05.05.03

Seagulls - we got a lot of 'em here in sunny Brighton.

Fuckers used to dive bomb my ex-girlfriend's sky light.

grant

16:58 / 05.05.03

Racoons. Plural. Actually, this is my better half's house, but I was basically living there and had to get up in the middle of the night, trip down the stairs and chase them away from the cat's dishes and back out the kitty door. They always came in twos and threes - a scout and a follow-up. And were bigger than the cats, so there wasn't much in the way of territorial protection.

One Christmas, a little opossum got in under the tree, started hiding between the presents. Very difficult to get those guys out of the house - too nervous to make a run for the door, always heading for cover. And they look like giant rats.

I'm not sure how "urban" Lake Worth counts as, though. Foxes are getting pretty common in people's yards. And there are bats, too, although most folks don't notice 'em.

And sphingid moths - just had the cats chasing one of those in my kitchen recently. An insect about twice the size of a hummingbird:

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