Visitors & other Friends !

Watchman's little visitor Friend

 https://steemit.com/@watchmany2k 

Hi All !

It's Sunday, it's cloudy & rainy. I've nothing much to do, so I thought I'd dash off a quick post.

    Here in the NorthCountry Visitors are a rare thing. My Elderly Neighbor goes to the nearly expired food store and regularly picks up food for his critters. His Kitchen table is right by the sliding door that goes out to his deck, so he has all sorts of feeding stations there.

    He has done this so long and so much that they spill over to my yard. I never know who is going to be on my front patio when I rush out the door to go jump in the truck. I have tripped over skunks and raccoons, Gophers, all sorts of chipmunks, squirrels. Every day in the wee hours of the morning I have three young deer come thru, I can't keep much shrubbery growing in the yard, but that's just as well, you see I'm lazy HA!

In fact I don't mow my "lawn" at all !

    When I go on walks on the trails around my property, I would gather wildflower seedheads, come home and broadcast them throughout the yard. 

Now I have a TON of flowers and colors that pop off, spring, summer, & fall !

    The Neighbors keep "Italian style" perfect lawns, and are out there every weekend raking, mowing, weeding. When they whine to me that my grass is getting tall, why don't I mow it? I simply point out all my neato wildflowers and say "but I'd kill all these !" They just shake their heads, no doubt mumbling something about weeds from my yard getting into their's...

   We live in the woods, surrounded by climax forest, now you can try to fight Mother Nature, and spray a boatload of chemicals to keep the weeds down-that ultimately end up in your well drinking water, or you can exchange most of the weeds for local perennial wildflowers that you sow. it's always fun in spring to see where they migrate to in the yard as critters and winds disperse the seeds.

  In fact, right now is about the perfect time to go for a walk in the woods and be gathering seedheads, they are mature, and drying. It does help though, to have had previous walks and make mental notes of where those flowers are growing so you can come back after the seedheads have formed and matured. It's just amazing to me how much people PAY to get wildflowers in their yards, and then try to limit them to one particular flower bed, it is, to laugh...

    So, the little feller in the pic is from a family of red fox that have moved in, under my neighbor's shed. I am sure they eat well, as the average acre of land can produce up to 4,000 mice per year here, not to mention all the little critters my neighbor attracts with his deck-feeder, I haven't the heart to tell him that why we now have foxes.

    This little guy was fun to watch, he was born over the winter, and this pic is from this spring, he was exploring my flower beds which are filled with chipmunks. Very cool to see him dancing around excited to smell and hear them, maybe get to flush them out in his clumsy attempts.

    A few weeks later, one night the whole family was out hunting. Earlier that week, I had noticed the undulating orange-y moving body of a gopher on one of my security/nature cams, but I didn't think anything of it. He liked the space underneath the wood racks, that I have out on the front patio and against the house. I guess a perfect place for a gopher to set up camp. Well, it was late at night, I had the windows open and was playing on my computer with no lights on, when the slow steady murmur of crickets was interrupted with a blood curdling scream !

    It got MY heart pumping, you betcha ! 

Gophers sound like a little girl screaming ! Loud and Long ! Scared the stuffin' outta me for sure !

That woodpile is right outside my window !

    The whole family of foxes were trying to get at him, but the firewood racks are just low and far back enough that they couldn't get an ...erm good bite on him...

    Even when I turned on the flood lights and went out an yelled at them they only trotted off to the far reaches of the light, stopped and looked back at me as if to say -"Go back inside-we got this"

    Sure enough as soon as I had settled back at the computer the gopher screamed again, and even knowing what was going on, jumped me again !

This went on for hours, I finally went to bed, I saw the gopher in the cams later that week, but he now had a more secure spot, thankfully far from my house.

   #life in these parts can be quiet at times, but never truly boring !

Have a Great Sunday !

-Watchman