Don't leave Bird food in garage
 

My love of birds coast me $1,500.

Bird food in garage= mice in garage

Mice in garage= Mouse nest and chewed wires in my E-300 TD engine compartment.

Bottom line ..Rough running and intermittent check engine light.

Cost to fix $1,500.

The birds can now fend for them selves.

This post is for the birds! :lol:

Heh. I had to do it. On a serious note: Ouch. That has to sting a little. Might I suggest a small metal garbage can for storing that seed? On the little farm I grew up on, we kept the grain and such in metal bins like that. It kept the mice from infesting the place.

Don't park your car near a Cardinal's nest during the spring...
they will repeatedly attack the outside mirrors...

Good to keep those sticky mouse traps in the cars anyway... many have posted about mice getting into their cars..with no bird food involved...

Do not use poison... you risk them dying up inside a panel where you can not get to them... and the whole car smelling for months..

Been there, and it is just awful!!!!!!!!!! Took several months just to be able to go on short drives. And a year later you can still catch a whiff now and then. Never found the "body", and have had seats and dash out. Probably crawled down into the evap box......:eek:

Wow, and that is in addition to your usual skunk problem....
just adding insult to injury when you can't even FIND where the problem is....
Next time I suggest spraying a lot of Fabrez around... leave for a day or so and then use Tuffstuff carpet cleaner on all carpet...
and spray Lysol into the intake of the AC/heater first thing when you get into the car.. with the blower running of course...

Our neighbor Conny kept her Jag (a gift from her lawyer brother back east) in a small carport next to their horse barn. The horse feed and waste attracted rats, which attacked the Jag's wiring harnesses. The mechanics estimated $13,000 to replace four large harnesses plus "whatever else we find when we get in there." Net result, the car has gone to Jaguar heaven. Conny has not yet told her brother what happened to his gift.

Sounds like a candidate for a 617 swap :)

Sixto
87 300D

Dont feed your chickens near your mercedes. The next mornng, flocks by the masses will fly in to eat the remaining chicken food on the ground and turn your Merc into a dalmation with all the black and white spots. Poor Myrtle looked like he had a very bad case of chicken pox!!! NASTY BIRDS!!!

That is what I do. I leave the metal cans under my porch roof and bungy cord the lids down to keep raccoons and squirrels out...

[QUOTE=leathermang;2139492]Don't park your car near a Cardinal's nest during the spring...
they will repeatedly attack the outside mirrors...

Boy can I relate to that one! How long do they keep attacking the mirrors? The only way I have been able to stop the daily barage of cardinal droppings down the side of the car has been to make form fitting cardboard mirror blockers with rubber bands holding them in place. This bird is driving me nuts! With my mirrors covered he's been attacking all surrounding neighbors vehicles. He's pretty consistent too, 6:00 A.M. to 9:00 A.M then nothing again until 5:00 P.M. to 7:00 P.M.


'87 300SDL 255,000
'94 SL500 42,000

Death Cars
 

Yeah , they _really_ stink bad .

I had a customer come into the shop , in July , in a black Squareback , some guy up North had comitted suicide in it in the woods and a bear crawled in the window and dragged him to the back area and had lunch then left , summer passed the his remains sort of melted and the fat and guts ran down into the tunnel and other inasceesable places~ the customer had bought the car (nice car BTW) from the Shirrif's auction and had the shredded interior replaced but simply could NOT sell it as the stench of death hit you when you were still 15 feet away.... :eek:

In time he sold it to me cheaply and I worked on it until the stench abated a bit then I waited until January and sold it cheaply but still made a profit....

I've had death cars , kennel cars , lots of really wierd ones no one wanted , I fixed and sold all but one , it was from Hall County Georiga and was hands down the nastiest car I've ever worked on .

A neighbor of mine had mice get into her brand new Camry. They chewed the wiring so bad it kept tripping the check engine light. It took Toyota a few weeks to figure out what happened. It was not covered under warranty. Now I see she parks over one of those ultrasonic type pest control devices- not sure if it really works.

I've had trouble in the past with mice but not anymore. I get those little bait traps that are like 4" by 4 " that hold these little morsels of food that is poisen. I use Duck Tape and make sure all my cars have them on top of their batteries. I just barely crack the lid so they can have fun getting to the food. Then from time to time I see the amount of poisen go down or the amount of food stays the same. At first they really hit the poisen then over the years they slowed down. It sort of slows down the pesty things in the house too if you kill them ourside where they go die and you don't have to deal with them.

I will never have a car without this sort of protection. Once I had the mice chew up the ignition wires on a Buick I had but no real major damage besides that but I see where it it can be a horrible thing to have.

I'd suggest everybody to do the same thing.

I'm getting visions of Hitchcock's "The Birds".

Seriously, we don't seem to have a problem with our chicken flock and carpet bombing on the cars....

Maybe it's your quantity, also we only feed them in the coop and the closed run.

Also use an old water softener slurry barrel to store the feed and cracked corn, it's plastic and relatively mouse proof.

Another chicken tip:

We have a bakery outlet in town, and they will sell the expired bread for $3 a cartfull. The flock loves it! I feed them near the cars all the time, no leftovers for the other birds, the chickens Hoover it up rapidly.

Bacon and eggs: A day's work for the chicken, a lifetime commitment for the pig.

Jim

Eeeeuuuwww!

I'm going to draw the line at getting a suicide car.....

Jim

Death Cars
 

We got a 07 Kia Rio at our shop from Enterprise that was suspected of being a death car. The poor bastid who had to bring it to us showed up with a nose full of vaseline and a dust mask. Stank so bad it couldn't come inside.
I could not find the source (I was the only one with stomach enough to get in the thing) Removed the seats, carpet, dash, trunk pad, no stains, no spots, just stank. (it came to be refered to as the Stank Car) Tried an ozone machine, industrial sized, for 5 days straight, didn't help. Tried it again for another 5 days, still the same. It ended up going to the auction. We had a good laugh imagining that car clearing out the auction bay.
The car was overdue to be returned to Enterprise for 2 months when it was found outside of New Haven abandoned. All we could think of that would make such a pervasive odor was something dead and stored in it.

Lesson to learn, if the car stinks, don't buy it. You might never get rid of the smell

I start the diesel inside of garage a couple of times per winter, and let it run for 10-15 minutes, doors closed...That keeps the mice population down, gas'em...I had rodents chew up wiring on a car, further, there were newborn mice in the ductwork, it was a serious mess. The way to long-term store your ride is to slather a lot of cheap grease all around the bottom 1/3 of your tires/wheels, and if energetic, place coarse steel wool into the greased areas..then rodents will not climb up and into vehicle. This works best if you can gather up cheap used wheels. Also, 'Irish spring" soap is said to repel them, place a handful of bars in interior and under the hood...

I used to find acorns on top of the IM of my E300 so I put a couple of these in the garage:

http://www.d-conproducts.com/baits/bait-bit-trays.html

No more acorns after that, just some greenish mouse turds and then nothing more.

Now I just leave a tray of these pellets out there...about once a year it will be emptied by some critter who makes his way in there but doesn't realize these aren't food;)

I can say they work well to keep the garage and my cars from becoming a "winter home" for rodents.

A customer at the shop where I used to work, kept bringing her '87 Poniac Grand-Am in with recurring electrical problems. Seems she regularly parked her car in a Washigton DC alley, next to a garbage-dumpster, and the local rats develped an appetite for her underhood driver's-side wiring harness. I finally wrapped the harness up with heater hose and the rats didn't seem to like the flavor of rubber so much.

About that same time, I was given an early '80s Toyota Celica for a tune-up & oil-change. The car had come in from NYC, and the first thing I found when I opened the hood was a huge dead rat baked onto the exhaust manifold, jammed up against the sparkplugs. The thing looked to be the size of a small cat, but appaenly had been baking so long that there was very little stench. Still, there was a slight extra charge for rat removal!

Happy Motoring, Mark

July of 07 we drove to St. Louis and back to calif. but in the middle of NV. the timing chain broke, and towed the car the rest of the way home.

The car sat in front of the house for a week before I pulled the engine. I opened the hood and there were ants all over the inner fenders and mosing around the car. They were after the bugs in the radiator.

there was a large trail coming from the garden to the car. time for Raid.

Also the Yellow Jackets were picking the bugs off the head lights, bumper, and radiator.

We also have several flocks of wild Turkeys in the area. every once in a while they hang around for a week or so before moving on. It is interesting to look out the front window and see turkeys standing on top of the mercedes, and the muddy foot tracks.:(.
When we had the horse they use to hang around a lot more cleaning up on the grain from the hay, etc...

I guess the mice/rats don`t read the directions on the decon box, it says they go for water and die some where else. well my parts Datsun PU that sits under my Costco tube tent garage, along with all my other automotive parts and treasures, MB parts also has been a place for them to die.

I was smelling something dead and opened up the door, and the stink hit me like a wet horse blanket:(.


I wonder if moth balls would work to deter the little varmets?

Charlie

I've got horse feed in the garage. And cats. Ergo, no mice.

Don't park under them trees either..

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/196/5...33eb88.jpg?v=0

:eek:

I have used mothballs whenever storing cars.Have worked out of the country on and off sometimes not getting home for as long as a year,never any rodent or bug damage.My wife hates the smell and it sometimes takes a week of using the car for the odor to subside to her satisfaction,as for me my sense of smell is pretty much gone so no problem. Don

http://www.drillspot.com/pimages/1624/162406_300.jpg

made right here in Minnesota

time to throw in the Mothballs in the engine compartment!!! and prepair to scoop up dead rats and birds...