Cute critters

I spent a big chunk of this morning scrubbing our deck and otherwise cleaning up after the squirrels, chipmunks and various birds that like the casual al fresco dining experience we provide.  It wasn't too bad but it's a shame they won't use the facilities.

Anyway, I got to thinking about the cuteness of my woodland friends (I say friends, but I've no doubt they'd turn on me in a moment if the nut supply dried up...) and I think I've worked out a way to measure their cuteness based on how much food you are willing to let them steal.

Take the chipmunks, for example.  One of these, which we started calling Hoover, was particularly fond of nicking seed from the bird feeder.  I even mixed in some cayenne pepper with the seed, which is supposed to deter mammals while going unnoticed by the birds.  This kept another chipmunk away, but not Hoover who apparently had a taste for the hot stuff.  I say "had" because I now think it was he, and not the little chipmunk, that was eaten by a cat a few weeks ago.  No chipmunks have been stealing seed since then.

Anyway, my point is that Hoover made of with bags and bags of sunflower seeds - chipmunks hoard tremendous amounts of food in their underground larders, something like half a bushel which is about twenty litres - and I really didn't mind.  Yes, he was being a rascal, but he was just do darned cute I couldn't really get angry at him (and I certainly didn't want him disappeared by a cat).  So judging by how much food I was willing to tolerate him stealing, Hoover's cuteness would have had the needle tapping at the end of the scale.

At the other end of the scale we have, for example, the ants that were plaguing us for a while.  They didn't actually make off with any food as far as I know, but that was still too much for us to tolerate.  Not cute at all.

And in between we find everything else.  The blue jays have been getting on our nerves because they've started hovering all the time to eat the peanuts we put out for the squirrels.  They may look good but they're not as cute as my squirelly pals.  And the bunnies are lovely to have out on the lawn - but woe betide any rabbit that eats any of my plants.

It's not a very scientific measure but it works in most cases.  I'm not sure if it still works when one cute critter eats another one - I'm not feeling any love for that chipmunk-chewing cat right now, but that's because a tiny fuzzy life has been snuffed out, not because I'm thinking of all that seed going to waste (no, really).  So it still needs some work.  I guess I'll just have to study these cute little animals some more.

House finch

This week's bird is probably the most common visitor to our feeder, apart from the sparrows, but it is also very skittish so until now I didn't have a good picture of it.  Yesterday my luck changed and I caught a house finch in the act.

This one was so cooperative, in fact, that it even did a twirl for me so that I could show you that it is only red from the front with a much duller behind.

Of course I can't be sure that it was showing off just for the camera, but it was soon joined by another one, equally gregarious.

These were both males, the females aren't red at all but just brown with white bars, though they still have the characteristic finch beak.  In the late winter we would have many of these little birds vying for a place at our feeder, but as the weather has warmed up they've paired up and started hanging out in smaller groups.  Today a little finch family visited the feeder, a juvenile and its parent, and the juvenile begged for food by flapping its wings and squawking.  The parent obliged.  It's making a rod for its own back, if you ask me.  First the grackles, now the finches.  I know that human children are becoming more and more reluctant to move out of the parental home, I didn't know it had spread to birds.  What is the world coming to?

Lights in the sky

Last night we had an impressive thunderstorm pass quite close, though it didn't actually douse us (we had to wait until this morning for that).  Much more impressive than the lightning were the lightning bugs, though.

Fireflies are a (now) familiar sight to me here in the summer.  For about two or three weeks now we've been watched them lazily fire their little yellow lights off as they buzz over the grass around twilight.  But last night was something altogether more spectacular, with hundreds, maybe thousands of fireflies sparkling in the trees outside our house and around the neighbourhood.

It's hard to explain exactly what it looked like.  My best attempt was that it was like a Christmas tree covered in flashing lights.  But I think Mrs Walles hit it on the head, saying that it was like watching camera flashes going off at a concert.

The lights looked much whiter than the usual fireflies we see, and they flashed much faster, and they were in the trees, not the grass, so I wonder if these were a different species.  Or perhaps it was larvae, hatched from eggs laid in the trees and putting on a light show for want of anything better to do.  I'm not sure what the explanation is, and I'm definitely not an expert on the matter, but it was something quite different and extraordinary.  Very flash!

Groundhogs galore

Continuing the week's wildlife theme (and it's hard not to, the critters are so prevalent...even as I write this I'm watching a squirrel have a good old scratch on a tree bough in the back yard) here are some slightly better pictures of my neighbour the groundhog from early yesterday morning.

I had hoped they would be even better than this, but at least you can see a bit more of the body than in the shots I posted earlier.  I might have missed it altogether, it was just chance that I was staring up the hill and spotted the movement against the brush.  It wasn't until it made its way over to the lawn, though, that it started standing out well against the background, so that's the shots I've posted.

Ultimately it preferred the low brush, though, you can see it's already pining for shelter here, and it soon returned to the dense undergrowth.  Not before I got this one in a standing pose, though.

It was in sight for a long time quite close to us and it didn't scurry off when I opened the door to get a better look.  It's quite a big critter as you can see, its body alone is about the same length as a squirrel including tail. And this one is quite small.

With any luck we'll see more of our groundhog friend as the summer goes on.  In the meantime I'll content myself with the squirrel, which is now having a nice wash.  Never a dull moment!

Wildlife update

I couldn't deliver any pictures of the Amish hard at work raising our deck, but I did get a great picture of our female cardinal this morning, perched atop the newly levelled bird feeder, all decked out in her finery.

The groundhog was closer to the house this morning so I took more photos of it too - that  was when Mrs Cardinal (as we call her) presented herself for this shot.  I still have to go through the groundhog shots and see how they came out.  The little critter was closer than usual but that might have been cancelled out by the mist that was hanging around this morning.  If there are any good ones I'll post them soon.

On the level

It occurred to me that I never posted an update on how the Amish were getting on with our deck, despite promising to do so.

The reason I forgot was that the two Amish fellows who did the job did it so quickly that they were off almost before I knew it.  They finished reattaching our deck to the house almost before I'd written the post announcing their arrival.  They also worked on a neighbouring deck, so they were in the vicinity for about another hour, but then they were off.

Mrs Walles tried to snap a photo of one of them while they were working but the opportunity never arose.  I had wanted to photograph the hat that one of them left on the ground while he worked, but I didn't even manage that.

I went out to inspect the results while they were working on the deck next door and they asked very cheerily if it was better, and we said yes - it was good to be able to walk out there without wondering if it was going to fall down under you.  That was the extent of our interaction, though.  The neighbours, native Pennsylvanians, just took it in their stride and were talking away trying to convince them to do extra work on the deck (which they did).  All in all it took them about 90 minutes to reattach two decks to the houses and replace the railings on one of them.  And then they were gone.  Raising a deck a few inches isn't quite in the same league as raising a barn, but it was still intriguing to watch.

Return of the groundhog

Mrs Walles and I were looking out the window the other day when we suddenly spotted something different in the trees at the top of our back yard - a groundhog! This is, amazingly, the first one that I've seen this season.  It's not as if they are uncommon, and we have even passed several on the side of the road in the car, with me missing them each time.  We've since seen this groundhog several times, though not as close as that first day.

It seems likely that it is the same one we saw last summer, since its feeding in the same places.  It is smaller than the one last year, but possibly that's because groundhogs hibernate, so they look smaller in the spring when they emerge compared to the autumn when they settle with a good supply of excess body mass to tide them over the winter.

Groundhogs are quiet little critters and they are built like tanks so that not much worries them.  Even so, they have a habit of keeping an eye out while feeding by rasing their head every few seconds to see what's going on around them.

This one wasn't too concerned by us even when we went outside to take its picture.  We were probably too far away to be perceived as a threat.

These are the best photos of our new neighbour that I have at the moment. I'm hoping it will come closer as time goes by and if I get some better pictures I'll post them here.