Animals Among Us II: dead things

Dead animals, their nests, etc. are generally easier to deal with than the living version, but there have been exceptions. It is not unusual to find a dead mouse when renovating an old house and I feel lucky I have never found a dead rat. Yesterday, I found a chipmunk in a rain barrel which had drowned and was 2x normal size. That freaked me out a little bit and I will spare the reader the rest of the details. In our first house an enormous dead yellow jacket nest was found inside a living room wall. The guy replacing some damaged drywall called me in and there it was, perhaps 5x5 feet in size,  four inches thick and wedged between the inner and outer wall. It was abandoned, perhaps sealed in with a good caulking job on the exterior. To us it seemed a miracle, because if active, the nest would have released hundreds of the small wasps many call "bees" directly into our midst. Once when I was about twelve, a pet newt escaped from an aqua-terrarium. I mourned, recovered and forgot it existed. The following spring, cleaning behind a cast iron radiator,  I found a mummy newt!  My brothers and I thought it was cool, but it bummed my mom out, so I buried it in the backyard.  In 2007, in our current home, an old mouse nest caught fire inside the wall next to our fireplace. It's presence was unknown to us and the resulting fire put us out of our house for 4 months (an ordeal- don't ask).  On a lighter,  but still unpleasant note: shortly after buying a house my friend had an awful skunk smell emanating from a  concrete slab poured by the previous owner. Rest assured- it did not smell this way when he purchased the home. This was in an area they had completely filled in, connecting the house with the porch. In the end it had to be broken up and revealed an entombed skunk. Apparently, it was alive when the cement was poured and had begun decomposing.  Dead or alive, the scent of our most beloved member of the weasel family is indeed a powerful thing!