After living for 6 years in Cincinnati and then Dusseldorf, Germany both in the temperate weather zone…we moved to Austin, TX earlier this year…We bought a house with a pool in the backyard surrounded by over 30 live oak trees…The month we moved in the live oak trees in our backyard were shedding their leaves…Even though we had a pool robot, I needed to clean out the two filter baskets beside the pool and the filter bag on the robot cleaner as much as twice a day and then use a long handled net to remove all the leaves which were floating on the surface of the pool…
Since the pool cleaner ran for half the day, every time I needed to empty the filter basket I had to manually shut off the cleaner on the pool control box before I began…One morning I went to open the control box and startled a snake at the base of the control box…I rushed back into the house to grab a broom and wear some closed pair of shoes…but before I got back the snake of course had long disappeared. I left the broom near the control box if ever there was a next time…
When the pool guy came for the weekly cleaning I told him about the snake and he said that every time I opened the covers of the filter baskets I should check if there was a snake there – because they often like to stay in cool areas. I almost had a heart attack as I had been blindly sticking my hand into the filter baskets to pull up as much leaves as I could before I could find the handle to lift the basket out and empty it. Since then I borrowed my husband’s long handled barbecue tongs to empty out the baskets rather than using my bare hands.
The pool guy also suggested that I pull up the large decorative grass growing near the control box. When the lawn people came on the weekend, I promptly got them to uproot more than 3 of these clumps and throw them away…
Next was seeing the bright green lizard on my back porch…the first time I saw him I thought of the lizard in the Geico ad…I had never seen such a bright green colored lizard before. I rushed to get a camera but as usual when you are searching for something you can never find it easily and before I got back to the porch – the lizard had gone. Since then I have seen him so many times that I am becoming nonchalant and just look to see where he is when I go out on the porch.
We needed to get some minor renovation done to our house and I had a contractor come to look at the work to be done. We were going to enter the shed below the deck when he stopped and said we should not go in there as he could see a Yellow jacket nest and that they are quite vicious. I had no idea what a yellow jacket was. Apparently it is a kind of wasp – with a bright yellow upper body – hence the name. I went to the nearest supermarket and went to look at sprays for the yellow jackets. The sales people told me that I should get one which I could spray from 8 ft away and also that I had to do it early morning or at dusk when the yellow jackets would still be in their nest and I had to be downwind from them when spraying the nest.
All these instructions were sounding too scary so I called the Pest control company and told them about the yellow jackets. They sent someone out the very next day and went all over the house and under the deck – they found and removed 4 of the yellow jacket nests – one was just beside the stairs we walked down to the pool area everyday and we had not noticed it.
We do have pleasanter visitors though – one is seeing the humming bird stopping on the live oak trees in the evening and now that we finally have some plants on the deck – they visit the flowering plants at dusk as well. Another is a kind of blackbird with a very long tail. I went on the native birds of Texas website to find a name – they are called boat tailed grackle…they have a very musical call, but are akin to crows and other pests…so far they have not bothered me much – I just hear their calling one another early mornings or at dusk…
