Our dried corn cob holder for the squirrels broke, so I found a replacement. It has screw eyes to hold five cobs on a rotating hub.
The lightest corn cob is the easiest for the squirrels to strip off kernels, as it is right at the top of the wheel. Then it gets more challenging to get at the kernels on the other cobs. The squirrels figured it out, though, and cleaned off every cob. They did shoot me annoyed looks.
Happy Mother’s Day to all that get the eye roll from those you nurture.
Everything is covered in pollen in Texas in the Spring. A thick nose-watering blanket of yellow dust also covered my front bench, which used to be black. Something struggled through that pollen and left strange marks in the film.
My current hypothesis is that an insect from the Lepidoptera family landed on the right side of the bench, crawled, wings flapping through the pollen, and something mammalian with non-retractable claws caught and munched it on the left side of the bench. Reducing it to the simplest and most likely candidates based on population density in our area perhaps it was a large moth (polyphemus maybe?) eaten by an opossum.
I was cruising the aisles at TSC and couldn’t find the seed and fruit cakes that fit my suet feeder. They had huge ones, but nothing to hold them. They also had “stackers”, which are seed cakes with a hole in the middle, like a donut. They did have the holder for these, and it was inexpensive, so that is what went into my cart.
I put out all this birdy goodness then realized it was going to rain soon. To protect my investment from washing away without going through an animal’s gullet, I fashioned a rain cover from a disposable pie tin lid with a hold cut in the middle, because that is what I had on hand.
I have to make a confession. The food out there “for the birds” is really for my squirrels. The birds are an interesting side effect, but I really like to watch the squirrels. The cute little land otters that they are. The squirrels and the birds agree though that the suet cakes aren’t worth their time or effort. Maybe suet is favored more with northern critters.
I do like the new location for the trail cam. I’m getting regular allotment of critters.
There were also the regular scattering of cats, birds, and squirrels, with one neighborhood dog going by. What I haven’t seen is any evidence of raccoons. I think our colony was really and truly wiped out by distemper about a year ago, which makes me remorseful. My animals are all vaccinated for distemper, but the feral cats are not. Raccoons are susceptible to both feline and canine distemper, so it could have been either a cat or neighborhood dog that infected them. Did you know that a group of raccoons is called a nursery or a gaze? There we go.
I strapped the trail cam to a tree at about calf height rather than a stand, which made for some interesting extreme closeups.
Critters and Craft 