A rat.
Saw this a few days ago…
Our camellia bush has lost its dern mind, y’all:
Does this make you want a cupcake, or is it just me?
I’ll say. It’s gorgeous!. Sending a great deal of envy your way. I’m still paging through catalogs; we’ve got another two months before we can spot green shoots coming out of the ground.
blondebear, you mention a lot of places that are familiar to me. Yes, I see the damage that the pigs do, too, in the places that I walk. And the places that I walk are not necessarily in the boonies, either. I usually walk in the suburbs or in county parks that are on the edge of wild land or farmland. One poor homeowner off of Watsonville Road had their entire lawn completely wiped out by wild pigs.
A few days ago we saw a huge flock of turkeys, and the toms all had their tails spread and were trying to intimidate each other. I guess it’s early mating season and they were practicing for the contests to come.
When you’re near a flock of wild turkeys, you can make a sharp noise (like honking your horn), and all the toms will “shock-gobble” simultaneously. Funny!
I heard the chickadees this morning singing their song - “Hey sweetie”. They are pretty quiet all winter, maybe just their chip sound once in a while. It’s a wonderful, promising sound to hear after the 2 weeks of -20F and lower weather we just had. The end is near. We’re on the downhill slide!
Today I saw mice! At some point every winter, usually in February, the field mice outside decide they need to warm up. I’ve plugged their access with steel wool wherever I find a likely spot, but it’s a big house and I’m a lazy guy.
My gf has decided I cannot kill them. So, I have live traps set and have gotten one or two every night for the past three days. I take the traps to work with me (my nightmare is finding a trap empty on arrival at work) and drop the little guys off in the field. I assume they die.
The previous owner of my house had installed bluebird boxes. Last fall I read somewhere that you’re supposed to clean out the boxes so I did. Although I felt a little bad about displacing the little frog who was occupying the old nest. Today I saw a pair of bluebirds scoping out one of the boxes. Very picturesque against the snow.
(A couple of months ago) saw a large, juvenile, golden hawk. It had burst through a screen and onto our porch. The door to the house was closed, fortunately. The cats watched in amazement: Their favorite place, occupied by a giant bird that could carry them away and eat them? If it were me I’d be wary of ever going out there again. The bird eventually left the way it came in, and our porch screen still hasn’t been repaired.
Now we have deep, drifted snow all around the house, including in that very porch. With the flapping, loose screen. Officially a no-go zone for a few months more.
One creature I’m in search of–unsuccessfully so far–is the California Newt (insert Monty Python joke here). There used to be dozens of them on trails in the Santa Cruz area this time of year, but I’ve yet to see a single one.
Just have to ask…do newts eat banana slugs? IIRC, having hiked a bit near Santa Cruz, these slugs were very common on the trails. (Or maybe I’m confusing those trails with other ones in the Seattle area. I forget which is which.)
I heard that yesterday too. I was thrilled.
A red-tailed hawk swooped into our back yard after the wrens at the bird-feeder. Its been over 10 minutes and they are all still hiding in the climbing roses, not a cheep out of them.
No - newts in the genus Taricha do happily eat slugs, but a banana slug is way too big. Some of them are longer than the newts and are definitely bulkier 
.
However Pacific Giant Salamanders will. They’re BIG. I’ve never seen it myself, but I had a friend who saw one cough up a mouse on being captured.
We’ve got bluebirds and house finches scoping out our nesting boxes already too. Last year there was an epic fight between a bluebird pair and a finch pair for one of the prime spots. The bluebirds won.
I have also seen a red-shouldered hawk pair hanging around in the last couple weeks, so this year they’d better be pretty careful.
Not just today, but just about every day around dusk I see murders of crows heading north to their evening roost. There are usually groups of a couple dozen, sometimes hundreds, in a procession that lasts for up to half an hour or so. I don’t know where they end up–somewhere in Mountain View, maybe–but I’m not sure if I’d want to live in that particular area.
Rabbits, rabbits, everywhere. Cold weather and continuous snow cover, so my gf has set up a feeding station on the back patio. We no longer walk out that door, other than to feed the rabbits.
This morning my friend and I were walking our dogs down a snowmobile trail. It was still dark out so we wear headlamps. The dogs (unleashed) were ahead of us. They were very interested in a big lump of something laying on the trail. As we got closer, my friend said, “it looks like a deer leg”. I got up to it and looked closely and said, “that isn’t no leg, that’s a head”. It was deer head with no fur, but it wasn’t just a skull yet. It reminded me of when I see people buying/eating goat heads on tv or in movies. It was quite disgusting. Part of the spine was still attached. Of course the dogs thought it was like finding a treasure so I had to pick it up and wedge it high up in a tree branch. When you have a Great Dane it has to be pretty darn high up! We walked a little further and then the dogs came across a deer leg with the hoof still on it. That was another trip into the deep snow to put that out of reach. At another point I had to stick my hand in Huck’s mouth to remove a large wad of deer fur/hair that he was trying to swallow whole.
It was an interesting morning.
More rabbits. My gf has set up a lean-to on our back patio, with hay inside as well as food. I mentioned that all they need is water, she went to the feed store and returned with a heated birdbath that is now being enjoyed by the buns.
Oh I hate that. I had to take a gobbet of stiffened squirrel out of our Dobie’s throat once.
This is from last week. Because of lockdown, we’re supposed to exercise locally, which means my cycling has been really restricted. So on three successive days I rode along an urban cycle path behind a business park/industrial estate and alongside a playing field. It’s on the edge of town, and it also runs past a field where someone keeps a couple of horses. The field had flooded from all the rain we’ve had recently, and every day I rode past there were six egrets in the field. There really isn’t anything else they could have been - there isn’t another “British” bird that looks like them; and they could fly, so presumably they weren’t some unusual species of farm fowl.
Very surprising.
j