(rabbit hole - narthex comes from Greek. Hollow fennel stalk - can be used to splint broken bones)
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The sort of āletās all share ____ā threads? Thanks!
I really enjoy finding points of commonality (unexpected creatures in our homes, wasps who wow, winning camouflage, etc.) that through the responses highlight the diversity of creatures we communally come across.
These threads feed the little girl in me who used to pick a tome from the encyclopedias and sit for hours, rapt.
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This post reminded me of a mystery we had several years ago. We discovered some strange things in our house - plant pots tipped out of windowsills, bags of food chewed through in our kitchen. Also, our dog had been sniffing and whining in several areas of the house. We suspected some sort of animal had gotten into the house through the dog door. After discovering some scat in the house we decided it was either a stray cat or opossum. We werenāt sure if it was hiding somewhere in the house or had left. So one night we closed the dog door and put out food in a prominent spot in the kitchen. That night while we were in bed we heard some noises in the kitchen so I went in and found a baby opossum on the kitchen countertop, looking for food. Weāre baffled as to where it was hiding during the daytime, but it had been in our house for at least a couple of days!
I just uploaded the observation.
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And I just added the observation to the āNever-home-aloneā-Project.
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Just about a week ago we started hearing about once a day we would hear a loud noise. kind of like a frog but more dry and slower pace. so like two days ago i was looking around a saw a hole in a pot i looked in and it was a gray tree frog. i donāt know if something was wrong with it. but because i have a humidifier in my room i moved it there so it can feel better. I might put it in my giant vivarium.
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I think most of my posted observations are just animals I find inside my house, but the highlights were:
- this house gecko who literally fell on my head while I was showering
- as I was falling asleep, my cat woke me up by stepping on my face and I got up to find this mantis on the wall by my bed
- this jumping spider that apparently lived on my car. It jumped on me from my carās bumper as I started to wash my car, then waited patiently crawling around on my shoulders/arms/hands as I washed, refusing any plants or other living spaces, only to jump right back to my car as I was drying the bumper off
Plus the multiple Nesticodes rufipes that live around my house catching mosquitos as rent 
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Also in Tonga we shared our house with Asian House Geckos, Mourning Geckos, and Pacific Dtellas.
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Love this thread!
These garter snakes were in my dog training building once (it was a wonderful thing to see). Also, another time there were about 6 small ducklings in there, but they scooted out under the wall before I could snap a photo. I did not post the snakes as an observation because there are two different types of garter snakes there (I think, based on markings, but I donāt know snakes very well).
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Thereās a project for these, too! https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/epivehicular-entities (Though if you want to add your observation to the project, you might want to add some information in the notes about where you found it and its behavior so the vehicular connection is clear)
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the wonderful thing about uploading observations to iNat is that you can learn more about snakes. eg, is this one species or two? ;)
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this is a reason to post it twice - once for each type! 
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Thanks for sharing the project! I think I have a lot to add to both projects shared here, so I may take the day to do so add more detail to the observations!
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In the span of a week, we had to rescue hummingbirds trapped in buildings multiple times (never had that happen before, at least not as frequent)
One day we had one that got in the office and I was amazed and shocked to see, that these little birds are actually tiny enough to get stuck on one of our hanging glue fly strips.
Had to carefully get him unstuck and we washed his feathers with with some dish soap and warm water.
After a few minutes of drying off and a big sip of the addiction juice (sugar water) he luckily swirled off again to pick fights with the other hummingbirds again.
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The adhesive is really strong. I think mythbusters did a video once where they scaled it up to human-size and it actually worked for humans as well.
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ā(usually human) character dies in a huge glue trapā is a gen Z memeā¦
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6 posts were split to a new topic: Observation field requirements for project
I forgot about this poor wee soul, who met his demise in the jaws of one of our pups.
I also was really looking forward to hearing what @austin_ajit might have found in his home on the other peninsula but I havenāt seen him in forever so am shouting him out.
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Lol, I was about to reply when I disappeared into a forest to see the annual butterfly migration. In my house Iāve seen a stinkbug, a blind snake, andā¦ nothing else!
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