As we enter winter’s home stretch, everything is getting hungry. The squirrel Amy saw in the birdfeeder is one example – we’ve had birdseed out on the deck since we moved in with scarcely a squirrel bothering to even nibble.
Something other than chickens has been eating chicken feed recently — it’s disappearing at about 2.5x the rate it should be. I’m sure mice avail themselves of food the chickens have left on the ground after the birds are asleep, but there’s no way they’re taking out enough to explain the missing feed. My latest guess is that that, too, is squirrels; I think they’re coming in during the day when the door from the coop to the run is open and the chickens are all hanging out in the sunroom. I’m going to try leaving the door to the run closed for a few days (the birds don’t go out much in the snow anyway, and have plenty of space in the sunroom) to test my theory.
The few inches of fresh snow we got a few days ago leaves other stories written in tracks. There’s a bunny habitat under some big rocks in the back of the chicken run that has had telltale bunny tracks leading to it all winter; today I noticed it’s also got non-bunny tracks leading to it (the bunny tracks look fresher, if you’re taking sides). Deer have been exploring new areas, and we saw racoon tracks in the pasture yesterday. Something also browsed through our compost; one creature’s trash is another’s treasure, apparently.
The cats in the shed are going to have a field day once we let them out! For the moment they’re still chilling in the rafters over the workshop, though, as they’ve just started to warm up to us and we want to get a bit more friendly before they get the run of the place.
