Garden Pests and Diseases: Deterring Digging Cats in the Garden, 0 by Equilibrium

Equilibrium wrote:
I'm glad I wasn't the only one who spotted the age of that bear that my husband took a photo of when he was camping with MY sons. I asked him how close he had to get to take that photo and he didn't answer. I suppose he could have used a zoom but that photo was not grainy at all. He snapped about 10 shots of that little bear so that tells me he stood there for quite a while. I'm thinking my beloved husband, father of our children, was well within charging range of Momma. What an idiot.

Yes, the baby snappers were hard to id from those photos as they literally had just emerged from the ground and those photos weren't all that great. They emerged for a few days in a row. I dipped one in the pond water to clean it up and photographed it but I can't find that photo. That photo was probably the best I had and I can't find the darn thing.

I started feeding the birds again here too. I'm mostly concerned about the Blue Jays. They got hit hard by West Niles.

I had a pair of Mallards nest here two years ago. We found their nest quite by accident. I immediately put chicken wire up around the entire area to deter coyotes from getting at the nest or the parents. That helped tremendously. We used to have wood ducks here but the English House Sparrows repeatedly kept destroying their eggs and killing their nestlings so I had to take down the nest boxes in hopes they would find a safer area in which to try to raise their young. The English House Sparrows wiped out my Screech Owls two years in a row too and they annihilated every Blue Bird egg and nestling the same year so I had to shut down all my Blue Bird trails. Depressing.

No, I'm not too happy about Henry "rescuing" that mammoth snapper. Not much you can do other than to hope Mr. Snapper moves on to bluer waters... bluer waters on somebody else's property that is. I'd still like to know exactly how he got it off the road and into his wheel barrel without losing a body part. That blows my mind.

I've never had any juvenile opossums hanging out around here but that would be nice. A few years ago, I was out in my yard and found a huge dead opossum. I walked back in my house to get into the garage to look for a big shovel or something to scoop him up with and get him out of the area where our kids play and dogs run to move him over to where the TVs hung out. When I came back outside I had to stand there for a while trying to figure out where exactly had the dead opossum been laying??? I thought it had been real close to the sandbox. Duh, he wasn't dead. Like my husband said, that's why the term "playin possum" was coined. My husband thought that was too funny and said, "Get it honey, dead possum now go put the rake and shovel back". He had a good laugh at my expense because the big old dead opossum could be seen casually walking away in the far back of the yard and it didn't even glance back once. Nope, I'm not the brightest crayon in the box at times.

I've always wanted a big open air porch like yours. I'd hang a swing for two if I had one. Your hydrangeas are gorgeous. I've got some Nikko Blues that aren't so blue lately because I keep forgetting to amend the soil with Miracid. Better put that on my increasingly long to do list if I ever want them to be blue.

Ok, not much going on in my neck of the woods but I'll leave you with this photo that I took last night and you have to guess what my kids bought at the pet shop yesterday. Now be honest, you're jealous that you don't have these living on your kitchen counter-