JACK ARMY’s "A Day in the Life” of My FOB

A chaptered story told on many blogs starts here and continues here:
Chapter Eleven: Wildlife
I’m not talking about crazy parties and frat boys boozing it up. There are genuine wild animals running around here! It’s almost like a safari zoo, only different.
There are dogs, as you might expect. Mostly they skirt around our FOB during the day, but at night a few will come on to the FOB and try to knock over trash cans looking for scraps. Occasionally we will trap the dogs and release them far away from the FOB, but they eventually make their way back, usually. We have not yet resorted to shooting the dogs, but I suspect we will if they become a big problem. So far, though, it’s just a few dogs and they stay away from people for the most part.
I’ve mentioned the fox before. Apparently, the story is that this fox has been caught a number of times before we took over this FOB and once someone tried to tie it up and make it a pet. Not a good idea, but the fox took care of the problem by chewing through the rope, which explains why it now has a collar. I still see this fox around the Fob about once or twice a week. He (or she?) will suddenly pop out from behind a corner or just be there, you know? And this thing slithers through holes that look way too small for it.
Right now, the swallows are everywhere. The Iraqis, leave the doors open and encourage the swallows to come in. It is good luck to have a swallow nest in your building, they say. I say it makes a mess under that nest and birds swooping past you as you walk in and out of the bunker or building is disconcerting, to say the least.
A few months ago, before Christmas, I think, there were huge flocks of birds flying east. In the mornings you would see these huge masses of what must have been tens of thousands of individual birds flying to the east, maybe to Iran? I dunno. Never saw them fly back west, though. At least, not yet.
We’ve seen a few snakes, several mice, and a few strange critters, but we don’t have a big problem with pests. It’s been cold but is warming up, but the insects are not yet a big deal. The flies, however, will be nasty, as usually and we all have our swatters ready for action.
I think a large part of the reason why we don’t have a pest problem is the trash cans. I had the dumpsters moved to just outside the wall and all the cans inside the wall have lids. I get on the guys about keeping the lids on securely and about taking large amounts of trash out to the dumpsters instead of just throwing it on the ground next to the cans. Hopefully, it makes a difference. One of the things I fear is going through a whole deployment without injury, combat-related or not, only to get some disease or illness from a bug or mouse and then have to go home sick.
Yuck.