Froggie

I wrote about the karmic retribution I witnessed on the morning commute today, but I have yet to write about the other thing that happened during my drive to work.

I’ve yet to write about the frog.

On two past occasions, we have somehow found a tiny little frog hanging out in our house. Once our former cat, the late great Miss Patches, cornered a frog in the living room. Years later our current pair o’ kitties cornered a frog in the hallway between the living room and the bedrooms.

A little research lead me to believe that the frogs are a tree climbing variety of froggers who climbed a tree next to our house and then came inside via the chimney through the fireplace. Seems logical.

This morning while I was in the car stuck in traffic on route 93 South Jen called me. She was calling to let me know that the cats, Miss Robin and Miss Lily had once again cornered a frog. This time in the dining room. They had it underneath a piece of furniture where it was paralyzed with fear. It would hop a little, the cats would freak out, it would freeze. This repeated itself a couple of times.

Jen wasn’t sure what to do. I said to see if she could cover it with a bowl or a box or something. She was already thinking the same thing. She didn’t think she’d be able to do anything with it if she trapped it. She has a bad back and leaning over to scoop up a tiny amphibian would be difficult for her. I said to cover it with a bowl and leave it and I’d get rid of it when I got home.

Fast forward 11 hours and I come home to find a bowl flipped upside down on the dining room floor. I cut a piece of cardboard off of a box and slid it under the bowl and walked it outside. I flipped it over to see if I had anyone with me and sure enough there was a tiny little frog in the bowl. I let him go in the front yard. It’s very likely he will be eaten by some predator tonight, but it’s equally likely he will climb a tree and hide out and be safe. Assuming of course that he is not so traumatized by the experience that he just sits there in the grass in a state of utter shock.

However it turns out for our froggie little roommate, he was alive when I left him. Everything else that happens now is out of our hands.

Good luck, my hoppy little friend.

Seeds

The bird feeders are full again. It only took them a few days to blow through four whole bird feeders worth of seeds. That probably means I am going to slow down on the feeder fillings in the near future. For today though, we’re full once more.

Big Critter

Woke up to this scene in the backyard:

Musta been a big critter. Is a deer big enough to do that? Probably. My first thought, and Jen’s first thought too, was a bear… I don’t think we have bears around here. I’m 99.999% sure we don’t. Still… a bear would be big enough. I’m probably overreacting to the size requirements though. I bet it was a fox or a coyote. Maybe a deer. Who knows.

I just know I need a new bird feeder post now. Oh well. To amazon.com we go.

Wild Kingdom

Daily writing prompt

Do you ever see wild animals?

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Would ya look at that! The bugs in the daily writing prompt system have been fixed! The text box with the responses link is back again, and the question is in sync between the web and the mobile app. Excellent! Thanks, dev staff!

Do I ever see wild animals? Yes, yes I do. My home is technically in a city, a small city at least, but my house is in a very sub-urban neighborhood complete with a patch of woods behind our back yard. We get the usual suburban rodents, squirrels (I hate them) and chipmunks (adorable) and stuff like that. We have a groundhog in our back yard. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not, but he/she/whatever is exceptionally cute when waddling around. We get skunks who only come out at night too, but we’ve never had an issue with them.

We have tons of birds. The usual fare, robins and blue jays and crows and chickadees and little guys like that. I am a big fan of cardinals and we get a few. We’ve had a whole flock of turkeys visit us. We also get little yellow finches (adorable) and woodpeckers (awesome). The best birds though are the hawks. Redtail hawks mostly, but there have been others that I don’t recognize. I saw something once that might have been a falcon but I’m not sure. I saw an eagle in the distance once, but it didn’t hang out in our yard at all.

We’ve had some bigger, less New England suburb common animals too. I woke up to find a grey fox terrorizing my bird feeders once. I saw something in the woods in the distance that I think was a bobcat. I know we get them around here, but it never came close enough to be sure. I saw a coyote once in the pre-dawn hours. He/she/whatever was hanging out down the street from us a ways, but it was definitely a coyote.

The best non-rodent/non-bird visitors, and the most common (though not that common) are the deer. I love the deer. I want them to be our best friends. I want them to let us feed them and ride them and sing xmas carols with them. The deer are the best. I’ve seen as many as eight or nine at once before, but that large a group is rare. Usually it’s only 1-3 at a time. I don’t care how many we get, I love them all.

Wild Kingdom

Wild Kingdom, outside:

Wild kingdom, inside:

No difference at all.

Sorry, Birds

I took the trash out this morning. When I opened the door I scared the shit out of two birds who were sitting on the steps.

Sorry, birds.

I walked down the steps and across the driveway to get to the barrels and I scared the shit out of a rabbit that was hiding between the cars.

Sorry, bunny.

I didn’t see any squirrels when I got to the barrels but I flipped them off in general, purely out of spite.

Fuck you, squirrels.

Back inside, I changed the cat’s litter box. When I took that bag out to the trash I scared the shit out of a chipmunk that was sitting on the step.

Sorry, chipmunk.

I dropped the bag full of discarded litter box contents into the trash barrel. The same barrel that the squirrels gnawed their way into so they can eat everything.

Eat cat shit, squirrels.

Squirrels Are Evil

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Squirrels are evil. They are cute, furry, little devil spawn, hell bent on destroying the world one backyard at a time.

I have three garbage barrels. I used to have four but one mysteriously went missing not long ago. They aren’t very big, but three are usually enough. Sometimes though they aren’t enough so I ordered two more.

All three of the barrels have a cover, but the covers all have holes in them, thanks to the squirrels. They gnawed their way in so that they could get at the garbage inside. They make a mess and I hate them and I want them all to die in fire.

The two new barrels were delivered the other day. Yesterday was the first time I used one of them. I put some broken down cardboard boxes into it. Today was the first time I put actual garbage into one of them. That was at about 11:00 this morning. At 1:00, as my lunch break was starting, I went outside to get the mail. Something about the barrel caught my eye. Something didn’t look right. I walked over……

It took those sonofabitches less than two hours to gnaw a hole in the lid of the brand spanking new barrel. There was a big, squirrel sized hole in the brand new cover for the brand new trash barrel.

I didn’t expect the new barrels would keep them out forever, but I was sort of hoping they would keep them out for more than a couple of hours.

I HATE SQUIRRELS!

Stupid Deer, Stupid Stupid Deer

As I was putting my shoes on this morning I gazed out the window without really paying attention to what I was looking at.

Movement caught my eye.

A deer!

Of all the wild kingdom critters we get out back, deer are still my favorite. As he (it was probably a she, but I still write he because it has one fewer letter… I’m just efficient that way) moved behind a tree and temporarily out of sight, I looked around for more deer. There weren’t any that I can see, which probably means there were 100 of them because those suckers know how to camouflage themselves like you wouldn’t believe.

So left with one deer in sight I did what any normal American would do on the day before Christmas Eve, I looked closely to see if this deer had a glowing red nose.

Now I know he’s not a reindeer. I’m not an idiot, you know, but given that all of the reindeer in the Rankin and Bass Christmas specials look just like your garden variety white tailed deer that you can see in just about any state in the Union, I thought that maybe it was a reindeer just trying to blend in with the locals. As I stated before, they can camouflage the shit out of themselves.

Nope. No glowing red nose. He even looked directly at the house at one point. If his nose was red, there is no way I would have missed it. Still, I started singing a little tune on the assumption that our back yard woods deer was one of Santa’s reindeer in disguise.

You know Dasher and… none of the others, cause he’s the only one out there….

The song kinda ran out of gas at that point. I decided to leave off the introduction part and just start with the melody that most people know.

That deer that’s in the woods there
Nosing around the leaves.
He is the only one out there.
are the others on sick leave?

All of the other deer there
Decided not to show their face.
They just left this one deer
to wander all around the place.

Then one foggy Christmas Eve Eve
Santa came to say.
I am kinda screwed you know
Where did all those other deer go.

But all the other deer loved him
Even though they decided to flee.
Those human things are crazy
Let them eat him not me.

That was fun, wasn’t it? As our one deer visiter friend left the area behind our house so that we couldn’t see him anymore, I realized something troubling…

I have that damn Christmas song stuck in my head.

Oh no! The horror! The horror! The horror!

Is That a Guilty Look?

Look who we found in the backyard this morning, picking through the leftover birdseed spillage.

Is this the asshole who took down the bird feeders and ruined the fun for everyone? He definitely has a guilty look about him.

Look at that cocky asshole, sticking his tongue out at me!

I took these pictures through the bedroom window. When I tried opening the window to get a better shot he ran into the woods. The jerk.

The New Rodent

At last, I have a picture of the new rodent living in our back yard. I’m not sure what kind of rodent it is. I thought either a groundhog or a gopher. I put two pictures on Flickr a few minutes ago and so far we have one vote for groundhog. Does the WordPress.com community agree?

So what do you think this little critter is?

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