i have a family of 4 under my shed. my dogs are fenced so we coexist peacefully. sometimes in the early evenings we bump into each other on a walkabout in the food forest. ive had her past a few feet of me with her 3 small kits in tow. cute lil’ buggers! shes so used to me now she barely gives me a glance. they take care of my junebug grubs in the lawn so its a win win for both of us. my wifes scared of skunks but terrified of junebugs. 
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Momma House Sparrow looks exhausted. She and the daddy have been feeding this child non-stop. He’s getting bigger and bossier every day. I think they are about ready to push him out.
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I w had to wait for a mom and 4 kits to get across the road at the end of my drive. She was working to keep them moving all in the right direction. The struggles of motherhood!!!
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@murky and @northwoodswis4, Yes! more have now shown their fuzzy heads so hopefully I can get them too. So far, the damage is limited to low hanging beans, tomatoes and eggplants. I definitely need to come up with a better preventative strategy to keep them out of the yard.
Back in the days of the Oregon Trail or the years of our great grand parents…rabbits, bears, deer, buffalo, and a lot of other animals meant the difference from starvation and living…in a way I wouldn’t mind giving up electricity and phones and air conditioning and going back to a world less crazy.
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On your post I see a hummingbird feeder and plant hanger.
- What are the two things that look like miniature houses?
- What is the white dish?
The white dish was a plastic yogurt container where I punctured a hole and then put glue around it to make it watertight. The bowl holds water and it creates a safety moat. Otherwise big black ants storm the hummingbird feeder and drink all the juice. They carry fungus and contaminate the Reservoir
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Even though we’re in the range of the Gulf Fritillary I rarely if ever see them. A month or two back I planted a bunch of penta…not sure if that’s what did the trick or this was just some random guy who got off course…either way, they’re beautiful looking insects.
Here’s some aquatic wildlife from the creek, a bluegill to precise…I catch and release using a small casting rod along with a bobber and worms…had seen a few fish in there before, but never realized how many there actually were.these guys are fun to fish…
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they are probably one of the hardest fighting panfish ive caught. another is white perch.
We would fish for the blue gills with a fly rod and a little roll cast with a cricket for bait. Nice eating fish too.
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Update on that nest in the orchard. The nest is now empty. That could mean they fledged, or it could mean other things, but I’ll keep it positive and not list any other option.
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So…just had exactly the same thing happen this year as last year…I accidentally mowed over a quails nest! Yet once again, I somehow managed to not hit the eggs. Still, I destroyed all the surrounding cover and tall weeds so now its just a nest full of juicy eggs out in the open waiting for some animal to come along and have for lunch. And of course mom won’t sit on them in the open like this. So…you know me…I’m breaking out the 'ole incubator and doing the job myself. Fortunately this happened at the perfect time in the life cycle of the eggs…ie mom hadn’t yet started to sit on them so they hadn’t started to develop. In that stage they will store for up to 2-3 weeks at outside temperatures without spoiling or without starting to develop. This is how mom is able to lay one egg per day for about 18 days (there were 19 eggs total!!!) and then start to sit on them all at the same time so they all hatch together. Also, for those who don’t know, baby quail are born like baby chickens…they are covered in warm down and are running around and eating bugs within hours of hatching. So its not like the blind, helpless, bald baby birds you find in most nests. That makes them fairly easy to raise and release- which is my plan. I may keep 2 for a nice dinner a few months after hatching (how many people just shrieked!?! Sorry but quail are wonderful to eat and I’ll still be saving 15 wild quail.
Anyway, here is the nest as it looked after I ran over it and how the eggs look now!
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id have done the same. ive raised pheasants and chukkar to eat but never tried raising quail. they taste similar to ringnecks?
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@AndySmith — your Bobcat Pic… We have a pair (Male and Female) that visit our back yard occasionally. The male is stout, stocky, like the one in your pic. The female is more lean and smaller, but she is the best stalker of the two.
I have a corn feeder for deer, turkeys, in my back yard… and of course the squirrels take full advantage of that too, all day binging on corn.
When the squirrels start hanging around feeding all day, that is usually when we notice the Bobcat pair showing up.
I have seen the male try a few catch attempts on the squirrels, but fail… the female on the other hand is very successful - they never know she is even around and bang, it’s all over.
Rabbits… about the only real trouble I have with rabbits is when I have sweet corn that is small… they will often just nip off a few corn tops, but sometimes just go down the row and whack them all off or several in a row. I hate that…
I don’t mind if they eat come leaf lettuce or something like that, but I want my sweet corn to be a good stand, not all hit and miss.
2 rabbits have bit the dust this week, 17 HMR style.
TNHunter
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We’ve never seen a Bobcat, so if not for the trail cam we wouldn’t have known they were around. Same for the coyotes. Plenty of red squirrels up here, we picked off something like 26 last summer. Here we have Eastern Cottontails and New England Cottontails as well as Snowshoe Hares. Generally they don’t bother my gardens, but last year we had a problem. Our neighbor was live trapping rabbits and hares and putting them in an enclosed pasture with domestic rabbits. Next thing we knew they had “bred like rabbits” and there were hybrids everywhere, and they were devastating my garden. We had to bring it to the neighbors attention and the husband took it upon himself to take care of them. He told his wife he was live trapping them and releasing them in the park (the adirondacks), but he was actually shooting them. I didn’t really care one way or the other, as long as they weren’t in my garden, and I didn’t really think they should have been breeding the wild stock with domestics anyway.
Our Coyote population has really taken off. I read an article stating their population would change with the beaver population, which makes sense here as we’re seeing a lot of beaver activity along our creeks locally. Most people think Coyotes rely on the white tail deer population, but in actuality they mostly just feed on carrion when it comes to deer.