SolarMonkey

Oh no the laser is too powerful! You shot straight through!

I had a pantry moth infestation as a result of inheriting birds. No matter what you do if you buy seed you will get moths again and again. It was pretty fucking bad at its worst… at night I would spray a paper plate with cooking spray and just swat them down with it next to the light. Highly effective.

But then I stumbled across trichogramma wasps. And it was literally life changing.

They are stingless, self-fertile (all female due to a bacterial infection, if you give them antibiotics they produce males again!), egg parasitic wasps, about the size of a grain of sand. They lay their eggs inside the host species eggs and their young consume the host egg. Once they hatch you never see them again. Tiny dots. You order them 15k or so at a time (depending on website and country probably? but they should be pretty widely available) and if you release them outside as intended, they kill off 95% of the target species (they prefer what they hatch from, which is usually moth eggs, but they can parasitize tons of pest insects). Indoors they can wipe out pest eggs. Then they die off because they are obligate egg parasites. No host eggs, no more wasps.

You need to release them for several waves to be sure, due to moth life cycles taking many months to complete, but they are cheap af (I paid $12 USD/15,000, ordered them every 3 months for 1.5 yrs, zero moths after) Zero work, and no chemicals.

I tell everyone who has birds about them now. I gifted the local bird rescue a 2-year delivery schedule, and made sure to tell everyone about it so they could pass the info along to any adoptees who might be turned off by the moth problem down the line and decide against adopting the bird(s)

I would hope that by the time something like this launched to the general public, it would be a service rather than an expected purchase. Like self-driving-flying taxis.

It doesn’t make sense to have everyone owning their own when they will probably be largely autonomous to avoid issues with individuals driving them (not that everyone owning a car makes sense either, but I digress), so the maintenance shouldn’t be an issue either.

Easily the rest of your life!

You remember flavored wax lips and wax vampire teeth?

Those were awesome. Not good, certainly, but interesting and uniquely gross!

I have this problem, but width only, not overall size.

I just wear men’s shoes, and even those are wicked hard to find. There isn’t really a category of shoes for my size (not big enough overall for drag shoes to be right, but far too wide for normally sized women’s shoes - I wear 6-8 [brand dependent] 4EW in men’s) and I’m not willing to spend a fortune on shoes to have cute custom ones made, so men’s shoes and sandals are my options. Boring.

Seems like work with no up-side, since no potato.

You could add a lemon to your potato for the same effect I guess. (But for real just the water vapor does the job 100% a bowl of water would do the job but making a potato wastes less energy because you are making food)

Wait wait. Do people not just cook a potato and wipe it down after as cleaning?

My whole life when the microwave needs a wash, you put in a big potato in a bowl of water, like an Idaho, or up to three Yukon gold or baby reds (whatever fits your bowl).. you prick them with a fork, put them in a large soup bowl with like a half inch water, and microwave for 11 min on high.

Let sit for 3 min after it’s done and eat as a baked potato or mashed potato, whatever you like, it’s a potato.

But then importantly you clean the microwave because the steam from 11 minutes of potato loosens all the shit and you can just wipe it out.

Cleaning is as easy as making dinner sometimes.

That’s because none of it (the good stuff) was accurate and we are all very sad about that..

So we need to eat the rich is what you said.

I’m on board.

Don’t correct me. I’m not listening anymore.

Yes and no.

My city has a separate license for game birds (like quail) vs chickens. But my city also allows chickens if you get 1/10 permits (I got one so I can start my flock, because I have a unique town property that isn’t flanked by residential, and thus barely qualified for it, with permission from my one neighbor)

Quail are mostly quiet tho so if you keep them inside, nobody will know other than a male screaming now and then, but it’s not a noise people would recognize (it sounds like he’s drowning, honestly, it’s loud enough I can hear it from upstairs, and it scares the shit out of my cats, but it doesn’t sound like a bird crowing in the same way a rooster does.)

Mostly they sound like frogs. I’m not at all joking. There’s a super solid chance all the native frog ribbit sounds I heard growing up along a waterfront were quail and not bullfrogs. Largely the same sound.

So yeah you could easily keep a small\medium covey with nobody knowing. Probably a few dozen birds easily if you wanted. I’m sort of doing that now because I don’t want my entire house to be inspected by the city and I don’t want to keep them outside (infections happen in nature), meaning they aren’t a game bird, but a pet. But a license for them would be $5 since I’m already approved for chickens, so it’s sort of meh for my situation, I just choose to skirt the law. And literally none of the people who want to buy my eggs are going to say shit about it, because eggs are -so expensive-

They need about 3sqft each bird to be happy and comfortable, multiple floors made of boxes or wire mesh are fine if the route is big enough for them (I use bricks, they work well)

They lay eggs wherever they feel, I give them a nesting box but they don’t usually lay in it. Basically it’s just a big poo for them, they aren’t really broody or anything, and they don’t mind you taking their eggs. Most they do if you handle them is try to scratch you with their big dumb chicken feet.