On nice mornings, I like to take my coffee into the garden and check on progress. That can mean: checking vegetable growth; looking to see what seeds are up; pulling a few knapweeds that have poked up; and squishing any caterpillars or rose chafers that come to my attention. Generally, my quest is to nip any trouble in the bud, but mostly, it’s nice to enjoy some early morning sun in the garden.

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A lovely morning stroll.

 

This morning was an exception. Someone had invaded. Someone who digs. Now, our garden has just been put in. Most of the beds are still seeds, just poking their noses out of the soil. So our intruder was not interested in our plants–it’s interested in grubs or worms in the soil.

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Wait! What’s this?

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Or this?

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Yikes! Or this!

 

Yesterday we did our annual orchard treatment with fish emulsion. Even though we flushed the surface afterwards with clear water–a fish scented garden was probably a strong attraction. That critter tried to dig under every orchard tree. Each tree has a mulch of tree bark, under which there’s some strong landscape cloth. So the intruder didn’t get very far, and certainly never found the fish for which it was searching.

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What we’d like, to be sure, would be a clear set of prints. I suppose every detective dreams of that absolute perfect clue for identification. No such luck. It made a mess of things but even with a bunch of digging in fresh soil, not one good print. We did find the place where it dug under the fence. We can fortify that, but, really, if this becomes a regular event, it would be a lot of work to bury over 300 feet of reinforcing wire. I’m hoping that the interest in the garden is a ‘one-off’ event, inspired by the search for fish.

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Ah-ha! Where it dug through.

 

We have noticed digging around the property of late. Rick has been burying rodent remains in shallow graves…the products of the cats’ hunting exploits. We’d noted that some of them had been dug up again. We blamed the cats. Grave robbers! Then, two nights ago, someone dug up our poor dead cat…buried last December. That raised the bar significantly–both because the cat had been buried deeper, and because it was just too gross to think of the cats digging up cats. We re-interred what we could find and put heavy stones on the grave. Now that the fenced garden has been breached, we have to take action.

We’re thinking it’s probably a skunk. We’re not thrilled about it–or how to handle it. They’re nocturnal. We’re not. And I don’t know if we could even see it to shoot it. We could trap it…but who wants a skunk in a trap? And then what would we do with it?

So my morning’s peace is suddenly punctuated with questions marks. I’m hoping this is a passing phase, so we can go back to the regular pests…the ground squirrels, birds and bugs that attack the garden. At this point, I think I need more coffee.

 

Post Script: It’s not a skunk. The footprints, though obscured are too small. And there are areas of excavation that only a smaller animal could have done. Maybe a weasel? It’s a partial relief, with a skunk, I’d need to be worried about the bees. Now, if it’s a weasel, I’ll need to worry about the chickens. Sheesh.