Javalinas, ants, and garbage

When we first arrived, we noticed ants showing up to enjoy our kitchen garbage pail. "What about bugs in the garbage bin, since we have to keep it in the garage?" I wondered. I could see a bigger bug problem developing. Bob wandered up to the community office to ask. "It's not bugs you should worry about, it's javalinas. If you don't wrap your garbage, they will smash through your garage door to get to the garbage," they said.

Okaaaay. Ants are one thing, but javalinas are something else. I can just hear the conversation with the property manager. "I'm really sorry about the garage door..." Bob and I ended up with large tweezers fishing garbage out of this large bin, piece by piece. We decided to wrap the garbage, freeze it in our almost empty freezer and take it out on garbage day. That may be way overkill and makes for a really weird looking freezer, but what do we know about javalinas? In Seattle, rats and raccoons are the biggest issues.

These are sculptures of javalinas outside our local Safeway grocery store. Javalinas officially aren't pigs, but they look like small, wild pigs and can be aggressive because they have very poor vision. They have a great sense of smell and love our garbage.

March 15, 2010: First javalinas seen at dawn this morning. I was looking out my dining room window as the sun was just coming up and thought "There's normally not a bush there." Then the bush moved. Then two more "bushes" appeared, ghostly in the dim light. Then a tiny baby "bush." Finally I could see the pig-shaped outlines. Javalinas!

With all the rain, there is lots of green vegetation in the arroyo behind my house and they have arrived for breakfast. They are bigger and tougher than those sculptures made them appear. And they can run fast. I'm told they smell like skunks, but the baby is so cute.

March 27: Javalinas in our yard this morning. We learned that we need to open the front door carefully and look around first before going out. A small one was four feet from the front door and then trotted up on our neighbor's front porch.