Inorganic Gardening: Wildlife

This morning, as I was pulling out of the driveway for work, I spotted something moving in the far corner of the property. The groundhog population has been on the rise and I've got holes in the ground all over the place so I first thought it was the groundhog I've been after for a few weeks.

I watched for a few seconds and it wasn't a groundhog. I wasn't sure what it was, I could only see the top half of it because the ground drops off right where it was standing. It didn't move quite like anything I was familiar with so I kept watching. A minute or so later I realized it was a raccoon. Odd to see a raccoon in the day time and this one wasn't acting very raccooney. Slow moving, almost staggering, didn't seem to notice the cat that was watching it from only 30 feet away, didn't seem to notice me. I called the house from the driveway and told my wife to keep the kids inside and call the cat in. We've had a few cases of rabies in our area in the past few months and I didn't want to take any chances.

I was trying to deciding if I had time to go back into the house and get a gun when the raccoon started across the field. By the time I got back it would have been gone so I just watched to make sure it kept moving. It did. I left for work.

Later, I got a call from home. Raccoon's back. Cat's in the house. Wife called the township to get in touch with animal control. Now we don't actually have animal control but there's an animal shelter not too far away and the guy that owns that will come out if the county calls him. Nobody at the township answered the phone so the next call was to me.

That's probably best, I called the guy a few years ago when I thought we might have a rabid skunk. He suggested calling the state police to shoot it. I told him I can shoot it, I just thought somebody might want to check to see if it's rabid once it's dead. He wasn't that interested so I just shot the skunk.

Animal control wasn't coming out and there wasn't much I could do about a sick raccoon from work so I suggested calling my dad to shoot it. I assume he did because my mom called and said that the crisis was over and I noticed a bunch of turkey vultures eating something in the back field this evening.

Which leads me to the real reason for today's post: We've got eagles. They've been a township over for 20 years but just started venturing out this far a couple of years ago. We see them more often every year and today there were two birds out at the carcass that didn't look like vultures. I got the camera and crept as close as I could get to get some pictures. I crept from tree to tree for cover and tried to hide behind a brush pile but eagles have good eyes and he spooked before I really got close enough to get a good picture but here they are.