The Feldmoching Marder Strikes!

So, waaaay back when I was trying to get a handle on moving to Germany, I was glued to the Internet trying to find out anything and everything about Feldmoching, the town in which I would be living. I found one thing. One. And this is that link. Feldmoching did not bode well for BMW's which I promptly pointed out to Thomas. And yet, here we are.

What is a marder? A marder is faster than a speeding S-Bahn train. A marder crawls into spaces molecules find to be a tight fit. A marder is stealthier than 007 squared. Marders are everywhere. Always. What do marders do? Eat. Sleep. Nest. Oh yeah, and eat through car wires and hoses. Lots. All at once. They are greedy little fuzzers. Marders are widely purported to have summer homes on Lake Fasanarie and have developed a taste for the finer things in life. Why snack on a Skoda when there's a BMW in the neighborhood?

Thomas' car got hit - or, more accurately, bit last week. Six hoses. We don't know if it was a local marder or if it happened when he parked his car somewhere else for a few hours. They are very territorial buggers. If a local marder had marked our car with his scent and then Thomas parked the car in another marder's territory, the encroached upon marder eats through all the hoses to destroy the "home" of the rival marder. The day Thomas brought his car in for service there were 16 other BMW's getting replacement hoses after marder attacks.

Whether or not another attack can be prevented is debatable but Thomas has built this nifty mesh wire contraption in our car park to thwart further attacks. Supposedly, if the marder runs across the mesh they think it is a trap and will abandon ship. Supposedly. We'll have to get back to you on that one. In the meantime, the device has given our neighbors something to talk about. Always happy to oblige.