Getting Rid of Undesirables in the Barn

The other night we were watching an episode of The Waltons where the Mom and Dad were going on a trip and left Grandma and Grandpa to watch all the kids.  At some point a skunk somehow got into the house and sprayed and the whole family had to sleep in the barn.

The next scene showed the family comfortably nestled in an impeccably clean barn.  The cows and chickens were in there with them, but amazingly, there were no cow pies or chicken poop.  Nor were the animals urinating on the hay.  I didn't see any spider webs or dust in the Walton's barn.  No rats, either.  What's up with that?  Tricia looked at me and said, "If a skunk got in our house, I don't think we could sleep in our barn.  Too many critters out there!"

She's right.  Currently there is a plague of mosquitoes of Biblical proportions around our place.  In the barn they are ferocious.  As we try to milk, they attack and bite our ankles, driving us crazy.  They land on the cows, suck their blood and then fall into the milking bucket.  The muslin rag catches them prior to falling in the milk, but you still must be VERY careful not to burst the mosquitoes as you remove them.  We do position a couple of box fans to blow them away while we're milking, but that is a temporary fix.  Below you can see the mosquitoes covering the wall.  If you'd slap them, they'd leave a big red mark as most are filled with blood.

A wall of mosquitoes

Unlike the Waltons, we do have cobwebs in our barn.  Although the photo of the spider web below is blurry, you can still see that the spider that spun that web is not going hungry any time soon with all the mosquitoes in it.  This was just one of many webs in our barn, so spiders are doing their part to help out.

A meal for the spiders

We decided that we'd give the spiders a little help and I plugged in a 'Bug Zapper' in the barn to kill mosquitoes.  Unfortunately, the sheer magnitude of mosquitoes overwhelmed the zapper.  If you look closely, you can see all the electrocuted mosquitoes cooked onto the lamp.  No more mosquitoes could be zapped because it was so filled up with dead ones.  I had to get the leaf blower to blow them off so we could zap a bunch more the next night.

Clogged up bug zapper

Mosquitoes aren't the only undesirables, though.  We've got rats in the barn, too.  Benjamin and I have been going out every night with a .22 loaded with rat shot.  We've got a long way to go, but we're putting a dent in the rat population.  Below you can see a poor male rat that suffered an untimely bout with 'lead poisoning.'

You dirty rat!

Even though we're slowly getting rid of the critters in our barn, we're a long way from being able to sleep in there.