Chow time on Eagle

When we moved to this house, we were very excited at the thought of lots of new critters to bond with and observe and work around, so much so that Himself went out straight away and got a big bag of cracked corn and another big bag of mixed bird seed.

So, the bird seed goes in the bird feeder at the back of the house, and the cracked corn gets spread out on the ground near the garage (or as we call it here, the building), so that it is far enough away from the house (which is also a building of course but not called a building). This allows the shyer critters to eat without disturbance.

The spare seed and corn are stored in the building.

Me, with all this largesse being spread around the property, I'm already worrying about my vegetable gardening prospects in a yard where the critters are used to being fed.

Apparently that's not going to be a problem.

Hmmmm.

It's my humble experience that if there's food, and there's critters, and there's humans, then critters beat humans to the food supply every time.

And so it goes on Eagle.

The bird feeder is not too bad. We have a large and varied clientele who seem to have organized themselves into an all day rota that involves tits and chickadees first, then jays, then other birds.

Repeat cycle.

The birds spill seed onto the frozen ground while getting it out of the feeder of course, and lately we've been seeing a northern short-tailed shrew (as in the picture) burrowing around under the snow to get at the seeds.

I'm so tempted to trap him just to pet him: his coat is the shiniest, furriest, most beautiful I've seen on a critter yet.

What a sable must look like against the snow???

I am very excited that he is living in our yard because Northern short-tailed shrews neuro-toxinate and kill snakes, which is a good thing as snakes are to Himself as bears are to Queenie.

And as we have a pond, that means we have frogs, which means we probably have some snakes around somewhere.

Further over near the building, we were absolutely thrilled to coast down the driveway one evening and catch a very big deer having himself a snack of cracked corn.

Himself in particular was beside himself with pleasure... none of this short-tailed shrew bullshit.... a critter isn't a REAL critter unless you can track it, shoot it, skin it, stick its head on your living room wall and eat what's left of it.

That evening, the deer watched us for a while, then ambled into the woods behind the house. Then, after a while, he ambled back into the yard and walked around. Chowed down a bit more, and then left.

Since then, he and his friends have been by quite a few times for an amble and a snack, but we've not had the pleasure of being here to watch them. We just find deer tracks all over the yard when we get home.

In addition, Himself has been finding pheasant tracks leading to and from the chow.

Yum yum, I keep thinking to myself.... corn-fed pheasant....

We rarely see the pheasants either though.

Himself is getting annoyed - he has a vague, irritating feeling that there's a whole pile of critters laughing at him behind his back.

He's probably right. Just after he leaves every morning, the pheasants start calling to each other. Ten minutes after I leave, I imagine they're knee deep in breakfast goodness.

This morning, I'm home waiting on the cable guy and sure enough, twenty minutes after Himself drove off, there were two pheasant, a partridge and a mess of crows standing around the cracked corn pile eating like there's no tomorrow!!

No doubt Mr. Bambi will be along later.

And the squirrel of course.

Our squirrel is one cheeky little bastard, as only a squirrel can be.

He infuriates Himself, who didn't spend a pile of money on nice cracked corn just so some rat with a furry tail could eat it all!

He's out there right now, engaging in a kind of hoover-sweeper movement across the cracked corn...

He spends a good part of every day scurrying around just to annoy Himself, with his cheeks full of corn and he has the temerity to sit on his favourite tree stump basking in the winter sunshine while chewing, right in front of Himself.

Then he got into the building, well, I think he lives there.... anyways, he managed to open the bag of bird seed, separate out every sunflower seed and eat them all.

Himself nearly had a fit when that happened, as Mr Squirrel dropped all the other seeds on the floor while sorting through them.

I sense many spats between those two occuring over the next few months. Himself might think it's his building.... but we all know who can more easily climb up on the rafters to shit on whose head.

Right now, the cable guy is here reorganizing our tv package - we're going digital in a last ditch attempt to find something to watch - and he nearly fell off the pole in excitement as a beautiful cock pheasant strolled across the lawn in front of him.

Yeah.. he's coming over for his breakfast I expect, I said.

Time for me to go to work... let the chow times begin in earnest.