Raccoon | nichepoetryandprose

poetry and prose about place

Posts Tagged ‘Raccoon’

at the bird feeder #3

I am amazed at the volume of seeds these little visitors eat.

The deer, racoons and squirrels take their unfair share, of course. Last year, I watched a deer attack the feeder with its tongue, scooping up every bit of seed in a matter of minutes. Even without the deer and racoons and squirrels, the birds descend in a flock and the food is soon reduced to a scattering of seed-husks.

We have come to a conclusion – next year we will put up a mammal-proof feeder. My brother-in-law has it figured out. He has installed a large cedar post in an open area and encased it in aluminum pipe and flashing. Enough seed falls on the ground to give a treat to the squirrels and other marauders, and the birds are the focus of the money-drain.

feeding the birds

I wait, no patience to speak of

for the next bird to find

this food more delicious than seed offered

by my neighbour, swears

he had cardinals, mine the left-over

chickadees and nuthatches, flocks of redpoll

litter the feeder, red-dotted heads, their toes

grip courtesy branches, a perch

impossible to find, after the freezing rain, branches

encased in slip-and-slide, candy-coated nutrition

won by complication, every kernel harder than stone

seed in a casing of black, sunflower

and pencil draw the finches, grosbeaks smash seed-coats

with deliberate jaws, shards of sunflower husk and ice-coat

fall as rubble

© Jane Tims 2012

Written by jane tims

January 13, 2012 at 10:18 am

Posted in competing for niche space, strategies for winter, wild life

Tagged with bird feeder, freezing rain, nature, poetry, Raccoon, squirrels, white-tailed deer

spacemen in our feeder

with 6 comments

Our feeder has attracted some little space aliens!

In one of my recent posts, I talked about the Grey Squirrel and its marauding ways. Now I have two more mammals to add to my list of bird-feeder pirates.

During the weekend, we went to the Co-Op and puchased a new squirrel-proof feeder. It consists of a slim tube enclosed within a cage with the squares too small for the squirrels to squeeze through. Raccoons can’t fit through those small holes either, but they can take the new feeder off its hook and just toss it off the deck! Once they had cleaned out the spilled food, they began an assault on the older wooden feeder with its hoard of black sunflower seeds.

Just before I went to bed, I switched on the outer lights to see if the raccoons had returned and got a wild surprise. Two little spacemen were cleaning the rest of the sunflower seeds from the feeder! They looked like Red Squirrels, but were golden-brown in color, and had white undersides, a lot of extra folds of skin and big black ‘wombat’ eyes.

Flying Squirrels!!

We know the Northern Flying Squirrel (Glaucomys sabrinus) lives in our grey woods, but we haven’t seen them for a while. They not only look different, but move very differently from the Red Squirrels. They are very, very fast and sort of flow and fold themselves across the surfaces they are on, a little like those ‘parkour’ urban acrobats who move fluidly over obstacles.

The two Flying Squirrels argued and bickered with one another and paid no attention to me as I opened the door to snap their photo.