Well...
chytrids (look at the second part of the name, which literally means "frog chytrid of arrow-poison frogs") are fungi. Fungi are the sister phylum to animals, so you're better off calling them animals than I am calling an apicomplexan a kelp. For what it's worth.
If you want disease-causing animals, you've got to get into worms. Something like pork tapeworm would probably do reasonably well.
]]>I suspect it is more that people doing WFH and kids spending a year of school from home change the local habits enough to push them somewhere else.
We are very close to a greenway system that follows the creeks through the city. The system has lots of "natural" buffer on each side. Plus there's a park 1/2 mile away that is about 10 to 20 acres of "wild" and is next to the green way through here. I suspect the patterns have changed due to the way people have changed.
Plus our back yard is enclosed more often than not which is a big change from before the pandemic. I have to wonder if the deer have a Yelp system to let each other know where the nice plants are located. The more permanent fence I'm putting up will have a real gate system which I'll leave open when I'm not herding dogs so maybe they'll come back.
As a side note, squirrels are smart, rabbits are fast, and chipmunks are just plain stupid. The squirrels have quickly learned that the camel bells ringing means take cover. Ditto the rabbits, but not as often, but they are fast enough to beat feet and get away. Chipmunks run 10 to 20 feet then stop and look to see if there's something to keep running from.
We ring the camel bells when we let out the dogs when we're keeping them for our kids.
Most of the birds on our feeder have figured out they can ignore the dogs. The pigeons and robins are getting better at leaving with the bells.
]]>There are muntjacs in various places in England which have bred from escaped pets. The road from Wolverton to Newport Pagnell, on the north edge of Milton Keynes, is sort of notorious for them giving people cause to regret the tendency of modern cars to crumple expensively at the slightest touch.
"I've also never seen a badger in person but if the sizes in Wikipedia for the US are valid then an adult white tail deer would have a hard time getting through a hole they dug."
I've never seen a live badger, but I've seen a few dead ones and they are big enough that I thought they were sacks of fertiliser that had fallen off the farmer's tractor until I got closer.
Badger holes are fucking huge, and the spoil heaps outside setts look like they ought to have tramroads and tipper wagons on them. Badgers are also very strong and very determined; you not only need to carry the welded steel mesh fence down a couple of metres below ground level, you also have to have it continue out horizontally at that depth for a way to make them decide to give up trying to dig under it. This means that when they decide to annex someone's garden, which they do by digging big holes in it and shitting in them, you can waste a lot of effort for no result trying to fence them out. What you actually have to do is shit in the holes yourself, but that doesn't seem to be in most people's lists of possible responses.
]]>My daughter's dogs seem to want to dig everywhere in our yard. I suspect they smell the trails of the various creatures plus the occasional chipmunk burrow based on the details of each spot.
Tossing their own poop in these is stops them from digging in that particular hole.
As I said way upstream, per wikipedia your badgers can get to be twice the size of ours.
]]>It doesn't matter if the badger is in the car or out of it, don't hit it either way. They're mean buggers at the best of times and really mean buggers if they're pissed off.
]]>More computer woes:
I've started having a problem with my mouse pointer disappearing - Windoze10. Mostly when I'm typing a comment in Mozilla Firefox. It just goes away and I can't get it back without drastic measures; use keyboard combos to Shut Down is about the only thing I've found that works.
I've followed what "help" I can find on the internet - disabled "hide pointer while typing" and enabled "show pointer location when I press CTRL key".
The latter works to show me where the pointer is supposed to be, but I can't move it with the mouse when it gets in that state. No matter how much I move the mouse, the "location" of the pointer remains the same, doesn't move.
]]>Different times.
]]>It should be possible to set up key combinations to move the pointer, rather than using the rodent.
Not sure how you'd go about it in Windows; I mainly use a couple of Linux distros.
And whether it would work will depend on what is broken.
HTH, but no promises.
JHomes
]]>The search for Gonzalo Lopez, 46, ended late Thursday in a shootout about 220 miles away. He led officers on a brief chase in a stolen truck before he was gunned down.
Authorities believe while Lopez roamed free, he killed a man and his four grandsons, then stole an AR-15-style rifle and a pistol from their ranch near Centerville...]]>
https://www.axios.com/2022/06/01/dangerous-wildlife-incidents-national-parks
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