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Comment by hodgesrm | Hacker News Reader

Ah, rodents and cars.

Many years ago a mouse built a nest in one of the heating vents of my car. He lived there peacefully until I went on a climbing trip with friends in the Olympics. We were driving up a steep dirt road to the trailhead, and I turned on the heating to help cool the engine a bit. At some point it got too hot. The mouse jumped out of the vent onto the dashboard of the car to get some fresh air.

It's hard to say who was more surprised: the mouse or the humans. We looked at him in stunned silence. He looked back. Nobody moved for what seemed like about a minute, thought it was probably more like a few seconds. Eventually one of my friends had the presence of mind to grab him and gently drop him out of the window into the bushes at the side of the road.

Then we all laughed hysterically for about 10 minutes. For the rest of the trip you just had to say "the mouse..." and it started all over again. Live well, little mouse!

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> Ah, rodents and cars.

I have a Prius with solar cells on the roof which power a fan keeping the passenger compartment from getting too stifling while parked in the sun. An adventurous mouse exploring the engine went took a fateful fall and got shredded by that fan. Cost me several hundred dollars to get everything taken apart and cleaned, and I'm sure the tech earned that money.

i worked at a CM-5 facility that had a minor pest problem. i'm pretty sure that like many supercomputers it was cooled by bringing air from underneath the floor and blowing it up through the stack.

the _extremely_ well qualified support personnel had to finally say they weren't going to spend any more days washing rat bits off module boards.

Hold on. That means you have a lot of stories! What CM-5 things did you do!?

So, umm, getting rodent poop particles airborne is the primary transmission vector of hantavirus..

That's why you're never supposed to vacuum rodent poop. Get it slight wet and wipe it off.

Denver International Airport was built in a very questionable area outside of Denver (there's quite a political story behind that). But one of the unexpected outcomes of this location choice was the interaction between wildlife and the remote parking area.

Rabbits. Vehicle wiring. Problems. https://denverite.com/2016/11/02/denver-airport-rabbits-eat-...

Who would ever imagine that their car won't start because a rabbit tested the edibility of some wiring.

> Who would ever imagine that their car won't start because a rabbit tested the edibility of some wiring.

This is a widespread problem in Germany, not with rabbits, but with martens. It is especially dangerous when they get a taste for the brake hoses.

What are martens? When I google, I only find the UK boots ;)

Surely not martins, the birds...

But yes, many ground creatures (including human babies) test the edibility of virtually anything by chewing and tasting it :D.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_pine_marten

Ah ha; it's sort of like a fat ferret. Cute, but devious.

Pine Martens are beautiful. I've seen them several times in the US. Squirrels are terrified of them--they are apparently very efficient hunters.

Apparently they're good for red squirrel conservation, they'll hunt the invasive grey squirrels but not the long-suffering native red squirrels.

Wow, I didn't know that. The first time I saw one was up in the Enchantment Lakes in Washington State. We came around a corner in the trail and heard the squirrels making a furious racket high up in the Douglas Firs above us. I remember thinking "hey, we can't be that scary, what gives?"

We turned a corner around one of the Dougs and there was a big Pine Marten scrambling up the bole of the tree, chasing squirrel for lunch. Mystery solved!

Never heard the name marten before, weasel is ised more often i guess. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_marten?wprov=sfla1

Yes but a European Marten of which he speaks is much bigger that a European weasel.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_pine_marten

This is the real culprit, in fact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beech_marten

Haunting people making noise at night in old houses is also a common hobby (but somebody must to run after the yummy mice).

Seems like they are primarily a thing of Europe. They have a special love-relationship with cars, especially the warm engine after stopping the car during the cool and wet season. After a rain and when my car is dirty outside, I can see their footprints all over the chassis. With modern cars and their enclosing of the engine (because of sound pollution) they have a much harder time to find their way into the engine bay where they would readily gnaw at any wiring and hoses they find.

There are super-sonic devices to be installed in the engine bay to shoo them.

In the spirit of HN's creed to encourage curiosity, I want take this opportunity to make my fellow hackers' lives easier and teach you skills for looking up information. Giving up after a Google search indicates you likely have a deficit.

You can use a dictionary or encyclopedia for word definitions. I like the Oxford for its quality, and Wikipedia for its breadth.

• https://lexico.com/definition/marten

• https://enwp.org/marten

User-friendly browsers like Opera 12 and Firefox have features to turn a form or search result into a reusable template that can be triggered with a shortcut from the address bar. I habitually make use of this for looking up definitions.

If you care to take the acquisition of skills to the 95th percentile and beyond, measured against the general population, then the material at Fravia's Searchlores (deliberately not linked) will do that.

In this case, you can also guess it’s an animal and search for “martens animal”

Guessing that “martens” is the plural of “marten” also works fine.

I think many would find that easier.

Some people here also equip their cars with some device that makes a high pitched sound when parked, to scare them away. I can't say if it works with animals, but it scares me away alright.

Perhaps there is a way to add a bitterant to the sheathing. Im sure this has been researched, maybe around the time they switched to tasty biodegradable soy-based harnesses.

My uncle had I think it was a Jeep Cherokee or something similar that had to be basically taken apart and reassembled with new wiring because for that model the manufacturer had used a new kind of wire insulation that mice apparently like to eat.

It's because several modern car manufacturers are using "natural" products for wire insulation and hoses in an effort to be green. Many are soy-based. Rodents call this stuff "delicious."

Toyota was sued over the issue but the suit was dismissed.

https://carbuzz.com/news/angry-toyota-owners-sue-again-over-...

In fairness to Toyota, the little arseholes will chew on anything. Metal, wood, plastic.

They tunnel into beehives and have waged war on my NAS.

I recommend this thing for rodents - they are insanely powerful.

https://www.connovation.co.nz/products/doc200-trap-range

That's quite a gizmo!

Here in the desert west of the USA I use the old half-full bucket of water trick. No swiveling cylinder nor bait needed; because it's dry here the water is the bait. And no bloody mess to clean up.

But wait...your NAS? Do you keep your hard drives outdoors?

The yellow sac spider is attracted to the smell of gas. Mazda had to do a recall on its 6 model of sedans (twice!), covering more than 100K cars in North America, because these spiders got into these cars and built webs which blocked vents, affected fuel pressure, and could have even caused fires and explosions (although the recall seems to have prevented these worst-case scenarios).

> location choice

At least in terms of wildlife, you're not going to escape this. Stapleton was just too small and getting surrounded by city. If you're building a replacement and have access to land, it makes sense to have a lot of it. At 50+ square miles, you're going to have some wildlife interactions almost regardless of where it is.

We had some sort of rodent, probably a rat, eat almost the entire engine wiring harness in my wife's car. In 48 hours. In the middle of Austin, TX.

Took 6 months to get the thing working again.

Curious about what routes you climbed! I did Olympus but that was more glacier hopping than technical, I figured most of the technical multipitch was in the North cascades around index. Would love some recommendations as I just moved

It was a trip up the West Fork of the Dosewallips to Mt Anderson (via Eel Glacier). Class three scrambling and glacier travel. Olympic routes are bushwhacks more than anything else.

For real alpinism you want the North Cascades, e.g., Boston Basin/T-Bone Ridge or Mount Washington. Nowadays I mostly do randonee skiing, in which case Rainier, Baker, and Adams are fine destinations with world class descents.

A mouse broke into my garage one winter and decided to use my not often used car as a nest for babies. I happened to use the car one day shortly after they were born (I assume) and let’s just say the shop was grossed out cleaning it all out. There was a stench for a few weeks still after replacing all the air filters and having the vents cleaned.

that’s actually dangerous. hanta virus is lethal and has no cure.

Terrifying - was not aware of that.

In this case I think what happened is the nest more or less was incinerated from the heat of the engine. Hopefully that would have killed anything that would have been aerosolized.

you're probably right. the severity of hanta virus is pretty closely tied to exposure, so it's usually only lethal in cases where people were exposed to a large amount of rodent feces.

however, mice carry around a lot of other biohazards. if it happens again I would say google the disposal process, and/or check the CDC's reference material for it.

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