Tree Rat and More Excitement!

Squirrels are so cute…aren’t they!?  Of course there was that family of squirrels that raised a family in the space above our living area.  Expensive removal process!  Not so cute!  They regularly raided our bird feeder for about 3 years in a row…and then that generation failed to pass on the necessary training or ‘smart genes’ to subsequent offspring…and there was ‘general human/squirrel peace in our yard for 3 + years in a row.

Recently however, those little ‘tree rats’ decided to declare war!  We were chatting with friends Bob and Teresa in our living room when Bob exclaimed “There is a squirrel in your screened porch!”

The squirrel was a bit panicked as he couldn’t figure out how he’d gotten into the porch in the first place… After chasing him out through an open door, we discovered that he’d eaten or clawed his way through a large section of screening in order to gain access to the porch.  You can see the tree rat’s hole in the photo as I’d covered it with a board and pushed our deck storage bin up against the screen.

Laurie had been keeping the bird seed for our deck mounted feeder in a container like this one in the screened porch.  It was closed tight and it is heavy duty plastic, much like the lid of a bucket of paint.  The little tree rat not only destroyed our screen but he gnawed his way through the top of the bucket to get to the seed…and to add insult to injury, he then peed in the seed!  We now keep the seed in the house behind solid doors and windows.

The hole still isn’t fixed… All contractors are just too busy to respond quickly to a small job like this one.  Using trivets to level off the storage bin and then covering the remaining openings with boards and bricks, we did the best we could to fortify the damaged screen against further attacks by our furry trouble makers.  So far, so good…

Continuing with the fun involved in home ownership… Our lawn service rang the doorbell on one recent morning to point out to us that we had a leak at the junction where our water comes into the house from the village’s water service.  He also told us that if the break was on the street side of the connection, the village would repair it at no cost to us.  However, if the break was on our side, get out the wallet!

So…a crew of 4 with a large backhoe showed up the morning after I’d called the problem in.  We watched as our tension over the potential expense rose exponentially. 

This wasn’t a simple process… First the crew moved all of our landscaping rocks away from the area where they would have to dig.

Then came the backhoe…digging deep enough that one of the crew could feel down into the hole and determine what the problem was.  Thankfully he determined that the break was on the village’s side!  He found the problem and repaired it as much by feel as by sight…although they did manage to bail out much of the water that pooled in the hole.

When they were done with the repairs, they filled the hole as much as they could and spread some straw to soak up the mud and prevent erosion.  The crew leader told us that they would put the rocks back in a couple of weeks after the newly filled hole had settled.  The instructions were that if they hadn’t returned in 2 weeks, give them a call.  We were out of town traveling and we’re approaching 4 weeks since the repairs were made…and a call will be forthcoming.

Our only concern is the impact of the damage done to the root system of that tree might have…time will tell.  

I included this photo for 2 reasons.  First – It is my favorite cold breakfast cereal.  Second – This may be the last box of Kellogg’s Special K Honey Oat Cereal left on the planet!  Kellogg seems to have discontinued this version and when I searched the Internet a few weeks ago, the best I could come up with was a single box of cereal…for almost $20.00 plus shipping!  Time for change…sadly.

With all the home construction going on around us, we haven’t seen many deer lately so Laurie was really happy when she spotted this doe and her brand new fawn in our back yard.  Laurie took these photos through a window and between the slats of the deck railing.  Mom was eating our greenery and the fawn had lunch at its favorite source of nourishment… Great to see them!

Just click on any of the photos to enlarge them…

Thanks for stopping by for a visit!

Take Care, Big Daddy Dave