Preparedness for when

westcoastscot

if it has long legs it sounds like a grasshopper - there are two types - those with backwards facing long antenna and those with tiny forward facing ones. Cockroaches have tiny legs and wings - grasshoppers have long back legs with big "elbows" and no wings.
Colour doesn't really count as they can change to suit their environment

[Deleted User]

GreyQueen wrote: »

it's giving me the willies?

Plural eh?

It'll be an earwig.

They have a spare one.

moments_of_sanity

This is a garden/field cricket...

http://www.organicgardeninfo.com/field-cricket.html

My eldest DD feeds these to her bearded dragon so we sometimes find the occasional 'escapee'

westcoastscot

Asked youngest and we're fairly certain its a hopper - roaches are almond shaped and flat, and mostly don't jump but fly or crawl. Hoppers have body depth when viewed from the side - have no wings so cannot fly but can jump long distances. They have back legs well out of proportion to their body and front legs, whereas roaches have slightly bigger back legs but still out to the sides rather than elbows in the air, iykwim

edited to add MOS that looks like it matches GQ's description perfectly! yuk!

GreyQueen

Bedsit_Bob wrote: »

Plural eh?

It'll be an earwig.

They have a spare one.

It isn't a ruddy earwig, it's four times the size! Anyroad, according to Wiki those bits out the back are called cerci and are used for various purposes, including assisting with copulation. As it doesn't seem to have an ovipositor, it's likely a boy-cricket.

Cross-checking it with pix online makes me think it's some kind of cricket. Crickets get to live, 'roaches get squidged. I'm not dealing with it tonight, it can stay under the glass and be dealt with tomorrow when it's less frisky. Don't want it getting away from me and hiding out in the flat.

Gordon Bennett, I live in the concrete jungle, what the blue blazes is it doing in here?! This place is so small that anything bigger than a pod spider should be paying rent.

ETA MoS, it's similar to that pic but the difference could probably be down to that being an American one. By comparison, "my" cricket (?) is much lighter, the antenna are shorter and held upright and the cerci are shorter in relation to the body. It's a big beggar!

I just moved the glass gently out of the doorway and the critter was pinging around inside like a mad thing. OK, it's p'd off but I'm not risking it escaping elsewhere into the flat between me sliding a piece of paper under the glass and taking it outside and depositing it in the shrubbery.

'Sides, it's a filthy rainy night out there and it's much better off under a glass in a heated home, I guess.

S_Wales_Saver

I use Excel in work GQ but at home I favour googledocs spreadsheets. Not quite so many functions but more than I need (and will auto sum). As I use for all sorts including meal planning, I find the fact that I can open it anywhere including the simplest of smartphones very handy.

Really don't like the sound of the beast.

GreyQueen

I've had to steady my nerves with a pot of tea and some h.m. truffles a lovely friend made for me for Crimble.

The Beast is safetly under a glass on a tiled floor and it's staying there until I can find time to evict it without it pinging out of the glass onto my person - arrghh! - or escaping elsewhere into the flat -double arrghh!!

I pad around in here barefoot and don't want something that size underfoot. Ick. Flesh creeping just thinking about it. It's harder to deal with something if you don't want to hurt it, otherwise it could have been walloped with a rolled-up newspaper.

I'm not normally too weird with critters, have plenty on the allotment and just garden around them but I really really don't like them indoors, apart from the pod spiders (the daddy-long-legs ones) which appear from time to time. For some reason the pods don't trigger my arachnophobia and I can and will scoop them out of the bath-tub if they get stuck.

Read a newspaper article one time and these spindly little efforts are savage killers and cannibalise other spider species. If a big old spider comes under the front door, it gets glassed and evicted sharpish. I figure I'm saving it from a grisly death at the fangs of the Tribe of Pod.

I should have remembered from work that cockroach infestations are pretty rare in the UK. Our pest controllers aim to make them rarer still if we get called about them. Filthy, disease-spreading critters.

DawnW

Hope you get rid of your unwelcome visitor soon GQ. I must admit I don't mind just grabbing things like that and chucking them out of the window. It is the great big, disgusting slugs :eek: that invade my conservatory (rather too posh a name for the small glass and brick box on the back of my house ) that I can't bear! They are huge - even the chickens run away from them, instead of eating them up.

If OH isn't around I have to get a long handled shovel thing to get rid of them. They are just vile, and a bluddy nuisance in the garden as well!

jk0

GreyQueen wrote: »

I've had to steady my nerves with a pot of tea and some h.m. truffles a lovely friend made for me for Crimble.

The Beast is safetly under a glass on a tiled floor and it's staying there until I can find time to evict it without it pinging out of the glass onto my person - arrghh! - or escaping elsewhere into the flat -double arrghh!!

GQ, all you need to do is slide a postcard under the glass, then lift both glass and card up together, and release outside.

GreyQueen

:eek: You're a braver woman than me, DawnW.

Totally agree about the slugs, there's no call for those things to be soooo big and so inclined to get where they're not wanted, like your conservatory.

Read in a survival book that you can eat slugs. It recommended swallowing them whole if you had to eat them. One day you'll thank me for that knowledge...............:p

Right, gonna hit the hay as have a 10 hour day at the 'orspital termorrer. They're going to stick a cannula into my arm and keep taking bloods. Consultant wants to see what my whacko metabolism is doing throughout the day in response to my medications.

Then they plot it on a graph. Seriously. I have such a peculiar metabolism that every medical wallah from the practise nurse to specialist squints at my file and coos Oooo, that's Interesting!

I'd rather be boring but hey-ho, you have to play the hand you're dealt.

Something farcical will probably happen tomorrow. A year which starts off with a giant cricket is clearly going to be a bonkers one.

ETA; thanks, jk0, had forgotten about the postcards, was thinking about paper which would have been too bendy and escape-prone for this frisky beastie.