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Comment by pvaldes | Hacker News Reader

If you have a big enough garden, you could put an owl nest box in a calm place when the owlets constant screeching noise will not suppose a problem. Owls can be territorial and attack to protect the nest also, so leave them far from the house and alone. Unlike traps, they will catch ten mice by night each night and will dispose of the corpses so you don't need to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4P-KWBSbis4

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We're fortunate enough to have an owl (I assume a pair) and a couple of hawk pairs in my neighborhood (I can see them in the nest). There are also snakes (I've had to coerce a 3' black racer off my porch). Rodents have never been an issue.

The problem with denser city living is there isn't a lot of habitat for natural predators.

We have a couple of Red Kites nesting quite close by. Love watching them, and don’t seem to have a rodent problem.

There's a natural predator in cities whose habitat is "your couch."

But people say that allowing cats to be "outdoor cats" is a bad thing.

(Cats do hunt a bunch of species that aren't going to try to enter your house, and may in fact be endangered. But then... so would owls, hawks, and snakes living in the same areas. My point isn't so much that having cats outdoors is good; but rather that we should apply the same standard to having any of these other predatory species in our neighbourhoods that we do for cats.)

Because cats hunts for fun and don’t even eat what they kill half the time. They’re just out murdering birds for sport.

Morality aside the uneaten dead birds never go to waste. If a raccoon, opossum, coyote or bird doesn't eat the carcass something else will and it all goes back into the mix. The only way it becomes an actual loss is when a human interferes by putting it in a plastic bag or throwing it out in the trash and dooming it to decompose in a landfill.

Bacteria bringing up the rear.

Yeah but they too good at hunting the ones who aren't going to enter my house. They're little psychos[1], but I love my little psychos.

[1]: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/cats_actually_kill

I'm not sure it's actually true that we should apply the same standard to predators who are naturally present in an ecosystem and predators introduced by humans. The natural ones have to some extent demonstrated that they're capable of existing without causing their various forms of prey to go extinct.

cats are not local species, except you live at their original region. cats are invade species, local animals do not evolve with them. cat can easy extinct most small animals in your region, local predators will not. please do not claim "they are same".

The GGP commenter was waxing on about having owls in their neighbourhood to such a degree that you'd expect that they'd be interested in introducing owls into a neighbourhood, as an invasive species, for pest control — the same way farmers traditionally introduced "barn cats" as a pest-control measure.

My point is that any invasively-introduced predatory species can and will end up hunting local wildlife to extinction. A species that has never been invasively introduced before isn't suddenly a more "noble" creature. That's the halo effect. One should treat the statement "we should get a pet owl, and let it roam the neighbourhood freely" with exactly the same suspicion as "we should get a pet cat, and let it roam the neighbourhood freely." There will be an equal environmental impact from both.

(And any predator kept as a pet will hunt "for sport", because you're already feeding them, so any hunting they do — and they will hunt, if for "practice play" if nothing else — will be done on a full stomach.)

I use a reflective metal owl to deter woodpeckers who love destroying my house. It seems to be effective because I’ve not seen or heard the little peckers since. Your comment makes me wonder if these would also help with mice.

Just saw that my neighbor installed one on his fence. I'll ask him in a week how that's going.

Probably not. Mice don't even know what hits them

I see the balls of crushed bones and fur on my driveway all the time (what comes out of a coyote after it eats a mouse). There are eagles and owls around here, too. Still plenty of mice.

If you're lucky enough to have one move in. I have a bat house in hopes of natural mosquito control. It's been a few years and there's no sign of use.

Bats are amazing neighbors. For years our neighboor had a massive pine tree that was hone to a pretty significant bat population. We would always see them come out at night and start feeding. Mosquitoes were never an issue. A few years ago the tree had to be cut down because it was rotting inside and was at danger of falling down. Unfortunately the bats haven't returned, and everyone in my neighborhood is now fighting the mosquito.

The only issue I have with bats is I am now terrified of them. Several years back my kids Taekwondo instructor, a 21 year old picture of perfect health magnificent human being, was killed from rabies after a bat brushed against him in the night while taking a pee on the side of the road. Months later after it was too late signs of rabies appeared and he died in hospital. It was devastating. The bats in my neighbourhood commonly swoop down near you if in the yard and it is now scary.

https://www.cdc.gov/rabies/location/usa/surveillance/human_r...

This is absolutely nuts. Also how would he know that he wasn't bitten if it brushed up against him.

He didn't know. Bat bites are barely perceptible.

I am not sure by what part you think is nuts? Worrying about bats? I don’t like to play with odds and now personally know someone who died from it. I would rather not take a chance. Here is an article about his death and the rabies in the bats in our area. https://vancouverisland.ctvnews.ca/mobile/man-21-dies-after-...

I woke up one night with a bat flying circles around the ceiling of my bedroom. It flew all over my house until I trapped it in a room. It flew with total precision, like it was at home in a cave, nothing like a confused bird flapping around in your house.

I paid $400 to have it captured and tested (which involves killing it). It was negative. It could have bit me in my sleep, and I was glad to not get that series of shots (at the time it was those ones that go into your gut) or wait it out and wonder if I would die a year later.

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