Decorating With Wildlife Isn't Always A Good Idea

This week, Mr. HandyPerson offers a little cautionary tale for your entertainment.

If there is any advantage to being basically poor, perhaps it's that it causes a person to devise creative solutions to problems without buying a lot of new stuff. A few years ago, I needed some lamps for the living room, but I was strapped for cash.

I had some big, brown rustic pots and plenty of lamp parts and hardware. A landscaper friend had given me some unusually shaped, dark red manzanita branches. I put them together into two elegant tree lamps that created a warm glow and stunning shadows on the walls and ceiling. Neat-o! Everyone loved them, including me.

One day I was reading near one of the lamps and heard a faint "critch-critch-critch" sound. It stopped shortly, then began again. When I started walking around to find the source, it stopped again. Finally I placed the sound in the general area of the lamp. I couldn't see anything and eventually forgot about it.

Some time later, I was vacuuming in the living room and noticed light-colored dust collecting on the brown pots in very precise areas. "Odd," I thought. After encountering the dust a few more times and hearing the "critch-critch" again, I finally connected the two incidents and one day actually saw little puffs of sawdust being kicked out of tiny holes in the branches.

"Aha, bugs!" I thought. Did I think, "Ooh, icky bugs in my living room?" No. I thought, "A little bit of raw nature right here in the house! Pets! Funny things to show people at cocktail parties!" There wasn't a lot of sawdust, and somehow the little chewing noises became kind of reassuring on some lonely nights (you know, like when you finally get used to someone's snoring).

This arrangement continued for nearly a year. By that time, and in spite of the heat generated by the lamps (or, perhaps, because of it), little bore holes had appeared in dozens of places on the branches of both lamps. I was wondering how long these little critters could survive on a bunch of old, dry manzanita branches. Were they like an ant farm? Was this a self-sustaining colony? Were they mating and raising kids in there? One day I found out.

Almost a year to the day from the time I got the branches, I went to open a window in the living room and found a couple of odd-looking little beetles on the inside sill. Actually, they looked more like flying ants than beetles. I let them out. Next day, more bugs, about a half-dozen. Later that day, I noticed more, and they were near other windows, too.

This is, in retrospect, one of those moments of utter blindness that one recalls when feeling that one is probably too stupid to live, because I did not connect these new bugs with my "pet" bugs in the branches. These were "flying" insects, after all, and the ones in the manzanita branches were "tunneling" insects. It took actually witnessing one of the flying bugs emerge from one of the bore holes of the tunneling bugs the next day to remind me about the properties of metamorphosis found in many insects, like butterflies. And ants. And, as I remembered in a moment of utter terror, termites.

I immediately tore apart the lamps, chopped up the branches into plastic bags, sealed them tightly and took them to the landfill, where I thought termites might be more welcome. I captured some of the flying bugs, put them in a jar and took them to a local natural-history museum for identification, filled with the awful dread that I had casually injected my apartment, and my neighbors', with bugs that would subsequently eat our homes around us.

As it turned out, they were wood-boring beetles, characteristic to hardwood shrubs like manzanita, and not a threat to our fir and redwood buildings or our wood furniture. They prefer living shrubs, and they leave after the shrub dies (or when mating season arrives, whichever comes first). I got lucky this time, and eventually replaced the manzanita branches with curly willow, which was 1) very decorative, as it sounds; 2) very dead and dry; and 3) decidedly soft wood.

I sure learned my lesson. Well, pretty much. There WAS the incident a year later when I brought a small potted tree into the house from the outside courtyard during what turned out to be the first night of brown-slug mating season, and I could offer some fascinating descriptions of what four or five dozen 4-inch brown slugs look like at 3 a.m. crawling over light-gold carpeting, but that's another story. Let this be a warning to you about something.

Mark Hetts' home-repair column runs as space allows in the Home/Real Estate section. Send questions and comments to: Mr. Handyperson, P.O. Box 70, Seattle, WA 98111.