As soon as we pulled into the driveway, we discovered that other animals had been interested in our large tray bird feeder. The area about 10 feet in diameter around the bird feeder had been trampled into bare mud. The worst part though (an how can I put this delicately?) was the "droppings" left everywhere, lots and lots, even up on the deck, right outside the front door! Definitely NOT a good situation with two small dogs that wanted to get out of the car and run free.
We woke up the next morning to sun with clouds in the distance. Unfortunately, as the weather warmed up, more snow melted and it was quite a muddy mess in the front yard. I took the shovel and actually shoveled snow from drifts in layers on top of the muddy areas. At least it provided some barrier between the mud and dog paws!
Late in the morning on Saturday, I was sitting with the dogs in front of the fire, when 2 wild turkeys came strutting in the driveway - of course Sadie and Rudy went wild with barking, so the turkeys 'turned tail' and went back the way they came.
We spent the afternoon in Hanover looking for assorted items - I was looking for bird houses. We found some bargains at the Canadian Tire - a steer head belt buckle for Paul and another hummingbird feeder for me among several items.
I found some beautiful bird houses in Home Hardware, really fancy, but $45 and up!!! I also found some inexpensive bird house kits that I thought I would give a try.
The evening was spent watching "Argo" the new movie directed by Ben Affleck - very good - and playing highly competitive "Aggravation" games with Gordon. After the game, Gordon happened to look out and saw 3 very large raccoon's at about the same time as the dogs saw them. Well of course wild barking followed, which unlike the turkeys, didn't phase those coons at all! They just sat there one on either side of the bird feeder and one right inside it - looking at us like we had no right to disturb them.
Gordon banged on the glass door with no result, and finally had to open the door a bit and yell before they waddled away (but not far). It took a long time to get the dogs settled down for the night!
The next day brought light rain. After more disappointing results from the game camera, I finally got Paul to set it up inside the bird feeder. We did end up with some cardinal pictures and black squirrel picture - and hundreds of chickadee pictures. Unfortunately, none of the pictures turned out as good as the originals that were taken in December, but those were all totally erased in error!!! I will post the best ones on my Birds, Birds, birds page.
Took a walk late in the morning, sooo messy for the dogs! Decided to try and build the bird house but realized that we did not have proper glue and paint for the finishing stages.
We did see an otter running along side the deck outside of Gordon's room and Paul saw a few deer when he was returning from a trip into town. So overall, the wild life sightings were OK this time.
We were getting ready to leave on Tuesday evening, fairly late. Gordon had packed the car both before and after a late dinner. When he went out to start it at about 9:45 he discovered - it wouldn't start! Battery was dead. After some tense minutes - Paul realized that he had the riding lawn mower battery charged and we could try to hook that up and try to boost the truck battery.
I spent the next 20 minutes inside texting Tammy and Cindy trying to get a spare for curling the next morning at 9:00am. Paul suggested we let it sit charging for another 15 minutes, and that ended up doing the job. We finally got away at 10:35pm and got home about 12:45.
All in all, not a very successful weekend, although it was nice to have Gordon there with us.
No comments:
Post a Comment