Two months of vigilance on Olive’s part (sitting motionless for hours along the fenceline) have apparently paid off; she has killed 4 moles in as many days. We feel bad for the little guys… though anything that can actually get caught by one of our inept animals probably doesn’t need to be passing it’s genes along to the next generation, and we suppose we should be thinking about controlling their population, if we are serious about doing a lot of long term gardening.
We had to top our fence with another 1 1/2 feet of wire a few weeks ago to keep a large neighborhood cat out, and Winter in. It seems to be pretty secure now. As I was sitting and watching the birds at our feeder the other day, I contemplated the effect we must be having on the local ecosystem, for good or bad. The cardinals, which at first had no idea what to make of the feeder, now frequent it all day and they have a nest in one of the monster forsythia bushes. None of our cats are either capable or motivated to try and tackle the bush, and the fence keeps the neighborhood ones out, so that is probably one clutch of cardinal nestlings that will have a higher than normal survival rate.
The catbirds, titmice, chickadees, song sparrows, starlings, and thrashers are all feasting upon the suet we put out, and we even get a blue jay here and there at our feeder. We have a pair of towhees that hang out in the yard, and lots of robins. Curiously, the local doves avoid it, not that we are complaining about that. We had to move Lindsy’s water dish because little birds were bathing in it… we’re hoping to get a birdbath for them at some point. So we’ve made a little oasis for the bird population, though the argument can be made that giving them an easy source of food is unnatural for them. Or should we look at it more as a way of balancing out negative effects on their numbers that the huge neighborhood cat population has most likely had?
On the other hand, as I already mentioned above, we have apparently made survival harder for the moles. We’ve not had much negative impact on the ant population, though not for lack of effort on our part.
#wren
Speaking of the large local cat population, we’ve also apparently aquired a part-time fourth cat (she has made it clear she’d be happy to make the situation full time if we’d let her in) who is on the back doorstep waiting for her dinner as I type this. She’s one of the white cats from next door, a tiny little thing that unfortunately also just had kittens, and she’s kind of attached herself to us since we moved in. She spends more time over here than at her house, and they don’t seem to care. We call her “Wren” because she’s got so much spunk for such a tiny little thing. It’s probably a good thing that her and Winter hate each other’s guts, making letting her in the house or yard impossible.
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