Our back yard serves as a wildlife thoroughfare, but only after a snowfall can we see who’s been afoot overnight.
Gray squirrels hop across the driveway:
When they’re not busy raiding the bird feeder, that is:
Red foxes leave widely spaced tracks:
Even quadrupeds have trouble maintaining their footing on an icy driveway:
Turkeys travel in flocks:
And sometimes monsters stride the Earth:
Seeing as how it wouldn’t be a suitable blog post without some numbers, here’s a 1 foot / 30 cm scale with fox and turkey tracks:
Those are scary-big birds!
Merry Christmas to all!
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
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8 responses to “Merry Christmas: Winter Visitors”
And a merry holiday to you and yours as well.
(this is me VIA Twitter)
Do Turkeys have their own version of Twitter, called Gobbler? lolZ
The little feeder birds tweet and the woodpeckers squeep.
Had a couple of woodpeckers set up housekeeping in our Juniper stump garden gatepost. The hole faced the gate a bit below eye level and once the chick got big enough to peek out, I’d notice him keeping an eye on me when I was going in and out. When he wasn’t peeking out, he was practicing his drumming/pecking. Cute bugger.
Dunno if they’ll be back, but they’re welcome to that spot–rather have holes in my stumps than having them chew up the siding looking for leaf-cutter bee nests. (Hard to do with the house–cement board siding…)
Thrum-a-tum-tum!
When Downy Woodpeckers start drilling into the house, that’s my signal to load the suet feeder.
A few houses ago, a Ventpecker found the kitchen exhaust to be a wonderful sounding board for his mating calls. He scared the daylights out of us the first few times: it sounded like God was pounding on the roof and he wanted in bad. Turned out to be a Yellow-shafted Flicker who wasn’t deterred by anything we did…
MERRY CHRISTMAS, ED! And all the EDdite-Bloggettes!
Nice Pix, Sir!
Merry Christmas to you and family Ed.
When we bought our place, the shed’s T1-11 siding had already been attacked for the leaf-cutter bees. I noticed that the former owner left a lot of .45ACP shotshell casings (a special round with really tiny shot to be fired from a pistol) near that shed. I ended up re-sheathing the afflicted shed with an OSB-based siding. That reduced the problem, but woodpeckers will peck for the hell of it. The worst is when they start a hole, then stand in that hole to do another one a bird’s height above. One of the artifacts of mill-site is a 2 x 12 board fastened to a tree. A few years ago the peckers found it, and now it has a row of holes all the way up it.
My plastic downspouts get drummed on occasionally. Haven’t tried the ballistic solution so far, but they found out I can make a louder drumming on the downspout than they can. The stump-dwellers were well behaved, so I didn’t bother them… When the little one started to fly, he tackled stumps about 6″ high. They were pretty well debugged by the time he grew up.