We own three vehicles between the two of us. My wife drives a Subaru Outback. I have a Toyota Tacoma as my primary vehicle, and a Mazda MX-5 Miata that I just drive when the weather is nice. It is generally the car I take to the golf course.
I generally do a good cleaning of my vehicles twice a year. I do one cleaning in the spring after winter, and another sometime in the autumn before we go into the yucky months of winter. This year with my wife’s health problems combined with the abnormally frequent rains we have had this spring; my spring cleaning has been delayed. Here it is the end of June and I am now just doing it.
I do need to mention that I retired at the end of January. This means that I am not driving my Tacoma as a daily commuter. Typically when we go somewhere as couple we take the Outback. We occasionally will take the Miata if the weather is nice and there will not be any imbibing of alcohol. My wife refuses to learn how to drive a stick shift, and I have no desire to receive a DWI. When I take out the Miata I have to move the Tacoma. I keep the convertible in the garage and the truck in the driveway. I mention this to say that the Tacoma is not sitting idle even when I am driving the Miata frequently. All of which brings me to my surprise of the other day.
Part of my cleaning regime is to pop the hood and give the engine a good wash down, check the fluids, etc. When I did so, I discovered this amazing nest in the corner of the engine compartment next to the brake fluid reservoir.
If you look closely at the picture you will see that the framework of the nest is some very large twigs or small branches! I say this as I am trying to imagine what sort of critter constructed this Taj Mahal of a nest. With the size of the base, and the fact that they would have to have come up from the underside I cannot picture a bird doing it. Or even a flock of birds. We do have an overabundance of squirrels in our yard. And we have at least one chipmunk. Other possible, but not probable candidates would be mice and the occasional skink. Given that the truck only remains in one spot at most for two days at a time, some wildlife architect would have had to work very quickly. So I remain a little bamboozled.
I should feel fortunate as this could have been a possible fire hazard. After removing the nest I inspected for damage, and all I could find was one grounding wire that will need splicing back together.
Mother Nature played a joke on me, and certainly played a joke on this would be homesteader.
Gave me a flashback. We had an old van we neglected for a few years and I ended up donating to our PBS station, and got a coffee mug as a gift. Anyway, I opened the hood one spring after ignoring the damn thing all winter, and found a mouse, or chipmunk nest on the dead battery.
I loved waving that ugly beast “Bye” when they hauled it, and the critters, away
Squirrels and mice are very good at squeezing into tight spaces for shelter or nesting. The wiring used in vehicles is an attraction because the coating for the wires had peanut oil as an ingredient. I actually found this out when I raked away some backyard fall leaves in my Maryland Hts. rental house one day and found a dig up pile of dirt and some colored underground wiring that was neatly chewed through. I called the cable company and they said they had been getting a ping from that area but did not find any visible damage in the boxes. Apparently, Sky had dug under the leaves and chewed almost all the wires through. People had been reporting disruptions to their cable signals for a week. They told me a beagle would easily smell the peanut oil, even while buried. It affected everyone within an 8 block radius of our house. Whoops!
WOW!
Just put a sack of moth balls under hood,problem solved