There are times when wildlife is not content to remain where it belongs, in the out-of-doors.  In our previous house, a squirrel had somehow entered our house and it scrambled downstairs into the recreation room my husband had built there.  Patience in trying to calm a panicked little animal did work since it was eventually coaxed into a container and my husband was able to take it outside to its freedom.

In this house I had a bread cooling on the counter freshly-baked.  The wind had blown the screen door open that leads to the deck and a squirrel had taken advantage of the opportunity; smelling the bread it obviously felt it had been invited indoors.  I had just come downstairs and ware prepared to enter the kitchen when I heard an odd commotion and caught a glimpse of a black streak leaping from the kitchen to the breakfast room and out the open screen door.  The bread was intact, though it was obvious from the trajectory I'd seen that the squirrel was on the kitchen counter puzzling out its enticement.

We have had a winter episode of an invasion of tiny black ants, and we were amazed at the number of them that kept us busy for awhile trying to dampen their enthusiasm for our inner sanctum which we felt should not be shared with them.  By treating the threshold of that same sliding glass door leading to the deck we were able to extinguish their enthusiasm for ingress.

We had a moth infestation once in our kitchen that drove me utterly insane.  I tried everything I could think of; inspecting all the grains and flours, everything in the kitchen was was secured by being wrapped in a plastic bag or stood within a jar, and even found larvae in some of those, among nuts, among raisins, in the dog biscuits.  All the scouring and dumping seemed to accomplish nothing, until I finally ordered a pheromone package on line.

And now, in mid-December, we've been invaded yet again.  This time by small black flies.  Flies that are blacker and slightly larger than the fruit flies that tend to flit about fruit sitting on the counter come September, that usually disappear in a few weeks' time.  It's been almost two weeks since we've been sending them to their maker; in the interim everything must be covered to avoid being possibly contaminated by their settling on food.

Most inconvenient and utterly baffling to try to imagine where they emanated from.