With Windsor's municipal strike reaching into it's seventh week our party is just starting. While administration is focusing on attracting visitors to see the Red Bull race (Art In The Park seems to be on the back burner for some reason) the effects of the strike are starting to show. If you walk down any alley or street in the city of Windsor today your senses will get tweaked real quick. Ever growing piles of putrid garbage, flys, torn and ripped garbage bags are piling up everywhere. Windsorites have learned to live with the condition "Out of site, out of mind".
That will be short lived though because we have some new party-goers on the scene. Rodents. One Monmouth Road resident hired a pest control contractor to alleviate a skunk problem. During the process he trapped eight rats in the alley. Several more scurried under the the garbage bin at the Mediteranean Bakery across the alley on the 800 block of Walker Road. It has become completely unsafe to walk up the alley in the evening because skunks, possum and rats can come from anywhere. Many residents have stopped taking their pets for the nightly runs because skunks and possum are even venturing through yards and onto streets in search of haut cuisine elsewhere. Even letting pets roam in their own yards is risky.
Walking up the alley to get some readily available garbage shots this blogger happened upon the ultimate pic. There it was...In broad daylight...Bold as brass. A skunk! Caring less about the blogosphere he was totally preocupied with mid day brunch. Was this huge luck or just a spike in the odds? This, dear readers, happened today. Eight days before Art in the Park. Here are the pics.
Walking up the alley to get some readily available garbage shots this blogger happened upon the ultimate pic. There it was...In broad daylight...Bold as brass. A skunk! Caring less about the blogosphere he was totally preocupied with mid day brunch. Was this huge luck or just a spike in the odds? This, dear readers, happened today. Eight days before Art in the Park. Here are the pics.
Please click on images to enlarge:
Plenty of food for rodents in this overflowing trash bin.
Pita bin where rats ran to. Seagulls, squirrels, and sparrows feed here regularly.
Garbage bags in the alleys are haut cuisine to Windsor's latest guests.
Here is Mr. Skunk forgoing his usual daytime nap to feast on garbage galore.
Rats were seen running towards this building.
Same building with uncut boulevard on Niagra Street. So what can we expect from here? Fear not. Windsor is still putting it's best foot forward for our upcoming calendar of annual attractions: Military Tattoo, Art in the Park, Red Bull Race, Freedom Festival, Ethnic Festival, Fireworks, Epicurian Delight to name a few. Waist high grass and mountains of garbage will not detract our visitors. It hasn't so far. With this bright spotlight on Windsor how can we not be remembered? Rats!
12 comments:
Thanks for posting, Mayor. I sure hope the strike ends soon. It is depressing.
What kind of bread do they make in there?
That's nothing. You should see the rats downtown. Scurrying across ouellette Ave. in the wee hours.
A box of rat poison costs $8. Rats cannot vomit, which is why the poison is effective. I suggest throwing a few packs around your property. It comes down to being aware of what is happening on your property. When I moved into my place on Monmouth, the crawl space under the kitchen was infested with rats and bugs. I cleaned it out and now I'd glady sleep under there. Rats don't like tidy places.
Who leaves garbage out in the open anyway? That's just asking for trouble. Steel garbage cans cost $30 a pop at Canadian Salvage and last for 10 years. Rat problems are your own fault if you leave garbage bags out on your property overnight. They breed and live as close to the food source as they can get. Put your garbage where it can be nibbled at.
Thanks for your tips. Here is the thing. These homes, at least on the 800 block are all as clean as a whistdle underneath and we too do not have rats there. TDhe alley is shared by commercial properties on Walker Road and this is where the trouble starts. The Francis Bakery is a classic example. Rats congregate under their waste bin which is usually loaded with rottingd flour and bread products. As for the garbage in the alley the situation is also hard to control. We not only take our waste to various drops offs etc. but we also do alley runs and pick up any trash which happens to be there. We dispose of itd accordingly. Again, because we are on a shared commercial alley we get transiednts dropping their garbage off in the East Alley. This is a historic problem. We control it quite well under normal circumstances.
I hope this helps control the rats as well as save on grocery bills.
Grilled Rats Bordeaux Style (Entrecote à la bordelaise)
Alcoholic rats inhabiting wine cellars are skinned and eviscerated, brushed with a thick sauce of olive oil and crushed shallots, and grilled over a fire of broken wine barrels.
What won't the French do next?
In West Africa, however, rats are a major item of diet. the giant rat (Cricetomys), the cane rat (Thryonomys), the common house mouse, and other species of rats and mice are all eaten. According to a United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization report, they now comprise of over 50 percent of the locally produced meat eaten in some parts of Ghana. Between December 1968 and June 1970, 258,206 pounds of cane-rat meat alone were sold in one market in Accra! This is a local recipe that shows the South American influence on West African cuisine.
Stewed Cane Rat
Skin and eviscerate the rat and split it lengthwise. Fry until brown in a mixture of butter and peanut oil. Cover with water, add tomatoes or tomato purée, hot red peppers, and salt. Simmer the rat until tender and serve with rice.
Stuffed Dormice / Ancient Rome
Prepare a stuffing of dormouse meat or pork, pepper, pine nuts, broth, asafoetida, and some garum (substitute anchovy paste.) Stuff the mice and sew them up. Bake them in an oven on a tile.
Roasted Field Mice (Raton de campo asado) / Mexico
Skin and eviscerate field mice. Skewer them and roast over an open fire or coals. These are probably great as hors d'oeuvres with margaritas or "salty dogs."
Farley Mowat also gives this innovative arctic explorer's recipe for souris à la crème.
Mice in Cream (Souris à la crème)
Skin, gut and wash some fat mice without removing their heads. Cover them in a pot with ethyl alcohol and marinate 2 hours. Cut a piece of salt pork or sowbelly into small dice and cook it slowly to extract the fat. Drain the mice, dredge them thoroughly in a mixture of flour, pepper, and salt, and fry slowly in the rendered fat for about 5 minutes. Add a cup of alcohol and 6 to 8 cloves, cover and simmer for 15 minutes. Prepare a cream sauce, transfer the sautéed mice to it, and warm them in it for about 10 minutes before serving.
Interesting recipes... Makes me REALLY glad that I am a vegetarian!
A little pita bread from that tasty looking Mediteranian bakery would top it off nicely don't you think?
A formal complaint was lodged by this author to Windsor's Building Department last December as major renovations and new construction were observed being done on premises where Francis Mediterannean Bakery continues to operate it's business. Six months later, nobody from the city has followed up on the complaint. The complaint alleged the property owner did the work without obtaining proper building permits. A fence barrier formerly ordered by a city building inspector has since been removed from the adjacent property and now allows stealth dumpers ample opportunity to simply dump their trash illegally. This operation is also in violation of city noise ordinances and zoning bylaw restrictions as they continue to clean bakery equipment using a gas-operated power washer that seems to run incessantly off the alley behind the building. New and brighter lights have been installed on the billboard situated in the adjacent field and infiltrate nearby dwellings unlike ever before. The rats don't only appear nearby as the real rats seem to lie at City Hall in their failure to enforce corrective action.
If you use poison don't forget to put them in bait stations so non-target species are not affected.
Isn't that the Mayor's bakery? Does he get the city to cut his grass or what?
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