One Man’s Pest is Another’s Gorgeous Rattlesnake

It’s hard to appreciate wildlife when it’s eating your food or giving you asthma. Michelle Niedermeier of the Penn State Cooperative Extension’s Integrated Pest Management program joins Billy and Tony to talk about how to get along with our non-human neighbors without poisoning everyone. Billy joins Bryan Hughes of Rattlesnake Solutions in Phoenix, AZ to learn about how to make peace with urban rattlesnakes. Last, Billy traps much meeker quarry (mice) in his kitchen, and Lawrence Crawford helps us wax poetic about mice (in Scots, so read along and click on the unfamiliar words) with the immortal Robert Burns.

western diamond back rattler next to bag of snake repellent

Some things work, some things don’t, to keep rattlers away.

Fruit Bats, Prairie Dogs, and Sausage Weasels

No theme this week, just an episode jam packed with some of our favorite urban mammals: We talk about the fruit bats (flying foxes) that call Australian cities (and lots of Asian and African cities too) home with Maree Treadwell Kerr of the Australasian Bat Society, prairie dogs that live in vacant lots rather than where the buffalo roam with Dr. Seth Magle of the Urban Wildlife Institute of the Lincoln Park Zoo, and we talk to two naturalists (Zhu Lei and Jeremy Goldkorn of Danwei) and  about the Siberian weasels of Beijing, threatened by the decline of the hutong neighborhoods they call home, and at least one of which that figured out how to raid a supermarket for sausage.

Siberian weasel stealing sausage from a Beijing supermarket.

Siberian weasel stealing sausage from a Beijing supermarket.

We do all this while sitting on Billy’s roof (scene of past microbat sightings) with Tony’s BFF and former band mate Bull, who also lends us a hand as we fail to ID flour beetles from Billy’s parents’ cornmeal. Last, we get some #wildlifebling from Kaitlyn Dunagan, who tells about house geckos in San Salvador.