Sideswipe

Auckland Regional Council's stuffed stoat.

A stuffed stoat devouring a bird's nest (pictured above) is part of four displays taken from an Auckland Regional Council car on Saturday night in Pt Chevalier and may have turned up in a lounge near you. The taxidermy animals are used by the ARC biosecurity team to educate the community about pests. All four displays are in distinctive curved perspex cases and include a ferret with a quail in its mouth, a possum and a scene of four rats. The ARC says they have no commercial value. If you'd like to return them, no questions asked, call Richard Gribble at the Auckland Regional Council on 366-2000 ext 8775. He'll swing by, pick them up and promise not to hand the matter on to police.

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The Community Leisure Management Support Office staff in Panmure were bemused by the burglars who robbed them: "We had (very proudly) an All Blacks training jersey and Warriors playing jersey displayed in our office. The All Blacks training jersey was donated to us by Saimone Taumoepeau through one of our employees, Jaye Puia, and the Warriors jersey was provided as we were an associate sponsor. When we arrived at work we found that the burglars had ripped the All Black training jersey from the case, but the Warriors jersey hadn't been touched."

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Michelle Vaughan of Remuera would like to communicate the following message to the well-heeled woman and her husband who walk their poodle-type dog past her house: "Please stop depositing your little blue packets of dog poo in my lavender hedge. My young children were understandably somewhat disappointed in the disgusting presents left by the white-haired stranger."

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Perhaps ACC had something different in mind with the Playing our Part - To get your rubbish sorted logo on their STREETSMART recycling trucks? A reader writes: "Our local trucks crew found time to stop and leap on to a neighbouring house lawn to raid a fruit tree, then spent the next 10-15 minutes mid-road in a feeding frenzy before driving on to continue their good recycling work, leaving a colourful pile of peelings in their wake."

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An imaginative excuse for DIC: Nyararia Mukandiwa, 33, was stopped after driving erratically in the West Yorkshire town of Huddersfield but refused to give officers a blood sample on the grounds that as a witch doctor it was likely to send him into a zombie-like state.