I had a cunning plan. It started when I bought this:
And filled this on our back patio:
I put the wildlife camera quite close, aimed right at this feeder. What would visit in the night?
The next morning it looked like this:
And had moved about 2 meters closer to the house. A true mystery indeed. Let’s look at the evidence…
The first few dozen photos (since no animal had apparently visited during the daylight hours) showed the above, some sort of tiny mammal that made repeated and frequent trips back and forth between the feeder and the trees next to our patio. At first I thought it may be a chipmunk but then I realized it seems too small and the tail is too thin. I quickly dismissed the possibility of it being a displaced Fawn Hopping Mouse so I conclude it may be a simple common mouse? For comparison here’s a chipmunk that stopped by 2 days later:
Anyway back to the first night. As I said this little mouse (?) was a busy bee, visiting the feeder continuously for about 2.5 hours (during which over 100 photos were taken). But then he seemed to be scared away by a ghost that emerged from the dark:
OMG! It’s a super rare skunk! A big one too, much larger than the baby I got in a single shot earlier this year. Could he be the same one? At any rate he wasn’t as shy as the little guy in mid summer, spending quite some time at the feeder showing off his big beautiful bushy tail:
And then he himself was crowded out when the deer approached and dominated the feeder for almost an hour:
These guys were big and bold and determined, and they explained why the feeder moved so much since they pushed it toward the house as they fed. But then Mr Skunk said returned bellowing “Oh no you don’t!”:
This seemed to scare the deer away, and after another quick push or two of the feeder they left it to Sir Skunk (who now seemed even bigger and bushier):
At this point the animals were just grazing on the bits and pieces that had dropped onto the ground, although the deer returned and eventually nudged the feeder completely out of camera range. By mid morning the patio looked like this:
And a bit later like this:
You can see the guy up the tree feeding out of the squirrel feeder in that shot. One thing I’ve learned from using these cameras is that squirrels and chipmunks seem to be almost completely diurnal, curled up cutely in their homes during the night when the deer, rabbits, skunks, possums, mice, foxes, raccoon and other creatures of the night come out to play.
I left the camera our for a few days and nights, but most of the action was in the first 24 hours. When Tiny Bunny hopped through on the second night…
…I reckon she barely waved a whisker in the direction of the now almost-completely-empty feeder.
