My welcome home party

I'm learning that when one leaves a house empty for 3 months, you never know what you'll come back to...my welcome home party was a little different than what I would have liked. Although I never thought I would post dead animals on the blog (we'll leave that to Aaron), I'm posting a picture of one of the many shrews that seem to have made my home their home while I was gone. Upon returning to my abode, I discovered not only the musty "no one has lived here" smell, but a very strange smell coming from the return vent to the A/C in the hall. After a few days of deep cleaning, I was discovering "droppings" all over the house that could only belong to a shrew. For those of you that don't know what a shrew is, Webster defines it as:

"Any of various small, chiefly insectivorous mammals of the family Soricidae, resembling a mouse but having a long pointed snout and small eyes and ears. Also called shrewmouse."
Somehow while I was gone, shrews got into our air-con, nested and then came in through the return vent in the hall closet. Fabulous, I know. So I called entomology on base and they came and fixed the problem, cleaned up the air-con outside, cleaned our ducts, and then I began putting candles, nice smelling plug-ins, and other odor killers out. This picture is a shrew trap that I set outside our front door and I actually caught one! Unfortunately for him, he was still moving and trying to escape when he was placed in the trash.
The evidence of these things is not only their droppings, but you can sometimes hear them when they scurry because they will squeak (and they are blind and run into things). And...I have heard something squeak in the house off and on the past few days...so entomology comes again tomorrow. Wish me luck!