Moving indoors

We live in a house constructed from three, 100-year old barns. The design was based on a children's book by Wolo, in which a squirrel escaped a forest fire by jumping on a log and floating down the river to a home inside a tree, where it lived with a variety of other animals.

The Wood House was also designed to be a green home, built so that you could heat it with a candle.  The architect brags about this in his displays at the big Green Festival in Washington, D.C. each year.  I can't even heat it completely with our fancy catalytic re-burner Vermont Castings wood stove.

I don't need an infrared monitor or camera to prove there are gaps and leaks in which air escapes or gets in.  Instead, simply studying the number of critters that make their home in my home tells me all I need to know.  Especially this time of year, we've found plenty of Deer mice (Peromyscus maniculatus) and their close relatives, the White-footed mice (Peromyscus leucopus).  We've also found several flying squirrels (Glaucomys volans).

But we also find Black rat snakes (or "Black snakes", Pantherophis obsoletus), our largest snake in most of the mid-Atlantic.  To the horror of our wonderful house keeper, we find them as often as every two months, sometimes sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor!

I found this young black snake right inside the door.  You'll notice how distinct its pattern is, and you can also see that it had probably never been threatened before, and therefore very comfortable being handled by me.