I was on a 420E CAT backhoe that had been sitting on an oil lease for months. MAJOR rats nests and not a dam thing worked on the machine. I pulled numerous covers off this machine inside the cab and out. Found rat nests under the radiator, on top of the engine, on top of the transmission, inside the steering console, and inside the right control panel......what a disaster! So I clean all the nests out and start my wire tracing to repair all the damage. After 4 hours of wire pulling and splicing I'm down to my last 3 wires under the floor. I'm standing on the ground outside the right door working on these 3 ground wires, and out of NOWHERE, a HUGE rat head pops out of the floor channel 4 inches from my hand.....Scared the living F&*% out of me! I jumped back and turned, hit my head on the door, dam near knocked myself out! Once I came to my senses again I wondered, how in the hell, with all the racket I was making on this machine for 4 hours.....being on this machine from front to back numerous times, even cleaning these nests out using an air gun, how was he still in there? The good news.......machine works, heart is ok, back to work today with a slight headache , and feeling a bit girly this morning after my wife died laughing last night about my whole experience. I wonder what today has in store for me?
Much rather see a rat a few inches away that grab a hydraulic line and it start moving. Seems like it always happens around hay season, There is an extra hydraulic line and it seems like the first on I grab ends up being a snake.
Oh no, not a hydraulic line. Never thought about that. Opened the door on my 242 SSL a couple of yeas ago to check the fluids. A 3' snake laying across the top edge of the door, as he swung out with it- looking at me face to face. Not cool. But I was glad I hadn't popped down in the seat and had him there instead. I do look very carefully before climbing into my skids now.....Something about being old, fat, clumsy and trapped in that cage with some critter.
Went in one morning and started greasing and checking the fluid levels on a D8 high track machine. Opened the door where the pivot pin oil reservoir is located and I am face to face with the biggest dustiest rat I ever saw. I fell off the machine trying to get away from him. He was so excited to be free he jumped from the machine to the ground and ran into a pile of brush, which I just so happened to burn.
So glad we don't have rats in Alberta.
Gotta love them rats!! Last gremlin I chased in a drill rig was rat related. Same drill rig sat idle on a completed bridge job for a few months. Went to give it a once over before we tore it down. Removed a litter of kittens from the engine compartment. Glad you got it figured out!
That you know of. ..... They're just like illegal aliens, lurking in the shadows just out of sight.
Believe it or not, Alberta has been declared a rat-free province for many years (I read 50 years during a Google search).
Maybe rat free of the rodent variety but plenty of the other kind of rats.
I quit mechanic work for two years in 95 and 96 and worked as a welder fabricator installing irrigation pumps building manifolds in the field. I was over in a area near Vantage, Wa. called Crab Creek installing a pump-welding a manifold. I had stopped for a few seconds flipped my hood grabbed another electrode flipped the hood down and saw something moving in the refection of the glass inside the hood. I knew where I was so I stayed motion-less, very slowly tilted my head down looking through the lens I could see a 30" buzz tail moving between my boots. I was in a squatting position. I was just hoping he didn't like nuts. It took what seemed forever til there was enough distance to move away. But snakes don't bother me so I didn't have to trowel my shorts out. If R Zucker reads this he knows where I'm taking about. Truck Shop
Speaking of snakes.... my buddy that has all the old macks is scared to death of them. I can throw an old bungee at him and he will bail off of whatever he's on. I asked him about going down to Tx to look at the Pete with the 12v71. He said we better go soon.....it's gonna warm up and the snakes will be out. I also recall reading a story in Wheels of Time about some guys driving an old Mack home and while they were cruising along the snake that had been in the headliner decided to say howdy, driver shart himself and bailed off in the bar ditch and jumped out of the truck once it slowed down to a running pace.
Do I know that area well... Were you down on Steve Rasers' place? I killed a 42 incher down that way that was under an excavator I was working on. They get a little bigger up by the old Milwaukee power station at Taunton. Saw one that must have been 3" thick up there once working on RR track.
When I was a kid, I'd sit up in the corn crib, and shuck corn, sometimes fer hours, with my grandfather. Only thing worse than pickin up a bunch of rat **** soaked shucks, was pickin it up and have rats shoot out everywhere... We allus kept a oak 2x2, fer whumpin 'em. When the corn would get lower, we had rat killins every chance we could. Neighbor one time had a rat killin, he set up a old push mower just idlin, against a hole the rats had chewed thru a board. We got on the inside of that crib, and beat, stomped, and noisily herded dozens of rats into that mower, blood and guts everywhere... Reminds me of the rev jerry's story...
Or snakes and scorpions! At least no snakes here in Northern alberta... Some years ago I was working on a job down in Mexico and one morning I opened the cutlery drawer to make me a samitch, and there's a scorpion in there staring back at me. We never would have thought he'd be in there but we quickly realized they could be anywhere. Some time later further south in Mexico we were moving our helicopter out of the hangar it was in and one of the helpers brought this big but thankfully dead scorpion to show us. We all oohhd and aahhd at him for a while and then went about our business. We finished pushing the helicopter and I casually leaned against one of the airplanes in the hangar and put my hand down on the wing without really looking. I felt something soft yet kinda crunchy under my hand so I looked down. There, poking out from under my hand was a great big scorpion's tail! I musta jumped 10 feet high and let out a yell before I realized it was dude's dead scorpion. Everyone else there thought it was quite funny, me not so much... That place also had a wide variety of snakes and one day one of the workers caught a bunch of those little deadly corral snakes in a glass jar with a plastic bag and some electrical tape for a lid. He was stunned that the pilot absolutely refused to take them in the helicopter...
Rats & Terriers
Yeah, I'm the same way about snakes. I stepped on so many water moccasins when I was a kid out on the farm that I'm skiddish about all of them.
that was a weirdly interesting video.
OKay rat story time huh? My only experience was at the shop in the quarry. We used cut off oil drums on casters for draining oil from equipment. Often there are a couple of them half full over by the pump that sucks them out and into the tank for the used oil furnace. One day as I was walking past this one full of oil that looked like it had come out of a two-stroke Detroit, if you ever worked on one you know what I mean! Something caught my eye, could swear something moved! Stopped and took a better look at the oil in the drain pan and just then it rose up and bit and went back under the surface. What the heck? It was like something from a 1950's movie you would see with kids lost in a swamp! Grabbed a shovel and next time it surfaced scooped it out and headed out the back door and flung it twenty feet out in the drive. Figured it was on it's last legs and it would die out there. Went back in shop and put some speedi dry down on the oil that dripped off while carrying it out the door. Looked out and saw that the sucker had actually crawled half way back towards the shop! He was not moving very fast so I grabbed shovel again and gave hin another toss to buy me some time to decide my next move. While I was doing my thinking an operator just happened to be running past the back of the shop and without knowing it he solved my problem! Oil soaked rat "0" 980 G Cat "1"! Then on a bit better note was the morning while waiting for start-up time in front of shop someone noticed something moving across the roadway in front of the shop. Not moving fast just walking nice and slow. From the distance we thought it was a ground hog. Then someone noticed the tail, it was a beaver! Not the most common thing in this area. I always thought they liked being around wooded areas with running water to build their dams, nearest stream is probably about a mile away. Guess the guy was lost! As he had been heading right in the direction of the crushing plant where all the trucks and loaders would be running around in a short time I and a couple other guys more or less herded him/her back it the other direction. At least in that area there are the settling ponds and no traffic!
My weirdest "wildlife" encounter so far was a giant wolf or wolf-dog hybrid that stared me down behind the shop one evening. We were like 25' apart and we just stared at each other for what felt like 5 minutes (probably 15-20 seconds though) before it turned around and wander into the trees. It was only then I noticed it was wearing a collar so it was probably domesticated to some degree.
Well, never met no wolf dogs, but MDA has been releasin coyotes(ask them and they'll deny it), to eat the deer. One day I seen one follerin the cows around the pasture, and what looked like a mangy balding fox, was tryin to eat some afterbirth from a cow that had just given birth. Cows was all in point, tails in the air, chasin him around, I went and got the trusty 22 mag rifle, and manuvered fer a shot. He looked like 2 shadows nailed together, through the scope... I had a clean shot, at 75 yds, but he wouldn't set still, so I whistled at him, he sat down, looked right at me, as if to say, just put me outta this misery, so I did... Mangiest lookin sickest critter I ever did see...
My only rat story started when somebody was stealing pens and stuff from my old office. It was weird, I would find the stuff all over the yard but it was in the office the night before. We got a half inch of snow one night and boom, a trail in the snow that led from the office to an old roundnose van trailer that I stored miscellaneous parts in. In the front of the trailer was a huge nest made from insulation from the van walls, but no critter. So I got a live catch trap baited with mixed nuts and caught a big bushy tailed packrat the next night, thing was almost as big as a cat, no wonder the shopcat didn't run it off. Anyways to make a long story short, my kids took it and actually made a pet out of it. Seems that those packrats are easy to tame, they fed it goodies and had it to where they could handle it in one day. next thing you know it was watching TV and sharing snacks with them. It really liked Cheetos.
Interesting rat video. Last week on NPR, they had a story about a "club" in New York City where all the owners have terriers that hunt rats. They go out of an evening, poke around alleys with garbage and score the terriers on their ability to flush a rat and then kill it. The things people do in cities for night life....
Can't find a youtube clip of it, but the 1978 sean connery movie, the great train robbery has a scene of 1800's where ratting was the evening's entertainment. seems we have come full circle...
I think I told this story before but here goes. Years back I got sent down to the coast area on a warranty call for an excavator that had some minor trouble. I had been to the machine before and got to know the operator a bit. They were on an emergency repair where part of the road bed had slid. Anyway when I got there I found three trucks shut down and the drivers out laughing like crazy. The excavator operator was standing be the machine looking pretty peeved. I got to him and asked what was the matter. He told me he got into the machine just before dawn and started it to warm a bit and then went to work. He said he felt something touch is leg and just kind of swatted at it like it as a mosquito or fly and then went back to work. He said the heater was starting to put out some pretty warm air so he turned the fan down and looked down and happened to see a big snake head looking back up at him and he shot out of the cab of the machine like a rocket. Well I got a bar out of the cab and coaxed the snake out from under the seat and then hauled him out in the brush where he should have been. It seems one of the truck drivers found the thing on the road when they got to the site and set it in the cab of the excavator. When the heater warmed up, the critter just wanted to move on and scared the heck out of the operator. The truck drivers gave the operator a new CB handle that day. Forever more they called him snake charmer.
speaking of snakes.. i was working down in central florida, it was a cold winter morning, air temps in the low 20's we were all sitting at the tables drinking coffee waiting for our monday morning safety meeting. one of the field mechanics came strolling in carrying a 50cal ammo can. he set it on the floor popped the latch open and kicked it over. the 6ft rattlesnake that he'd picked up on the road that morning, had gotten warmed up in the cab in the ammo can... he was NOT happy, neither was the boss about 10 years ago, i was at a customers shop, in early fall, working on an electrical problem, he'd already replaced a wiring harness, and had done all the troubleshooting he could. i replaced about $2500 of electronics, and got the machine up and running. early spring and we get a call, "it's doing the same thing!" i started doing some investigating, found multiple blown fuses. started pulling panels off, thinking maybe he pinched the harness when he reinstalled all the panels.. nope..... found a rats nest with the main harness running through it !!... 10 or 15 wire splices later and we were good to go. i couldnt believe what i saw, and neitehr could the customers mechanic... he brought the owner of the company down to the shop because he didnt believe us either
My snake story: I'm a rookie bridge inspector back in the late 70's. It's a nice sunny warm summer day. I go under a short span rural bridge. I can can walk on dry ground by staying right next to the vertical abutment. I can't stand straight up, need to crouch a bit. My head is level with the bridge seat /beam ends, about a foot away. Can you see where this is going lol ? I'm slowly working my way from one side to the other looking at the beams. I hear a soft pssst next to my head, I slowly turn to the bridge seat and there sits a coiled up snake less than 12 inches from my nose. In less time than it takes to blink an eye, I'm standing in the center of the road, heart pounding. Now the only thing I can think is if you move that fast, you don't loose control of your bowels LOL Now the good thing is we only have 1 poisonous snake the Mississauga rattler and they are few in numbers. I instituted new personal inspection procedures that day. Make lots of noise, kick loose gravel, and look closely at bridge seats.