little creep.

That would be the raccoon who took down all my bird feeders last night. And the night before.

Here’s the backyard scene on Thursday night:

We call this the “Love Tree” because the boy squirrels like to relentlessly chase the (seemingly) ONE girl squirrel in this tree during mating season. From left to right, we have a sunflower filled bird feeder, a suet feeder, a bird bath, another suet feeder, a safflower filled bird feeder and a thistle sock. On the tree itself is a squirrel feeder which gets filled either with sunflower seeds or cracked corn. I use a lot of safflower because the squirrels and the blackbirds don’t like it. Something about it being bitter. Good. We have a red wing blackbird community behind our house and they can be pretty territorial sometimes. The bullies.

In the winter, we usually put out corn for the deer – in containers on the ground. We live in a subdivision, but our house is in the back of the neighborhood and there’s a river just past a pond and an embankment behind our house. After Hurricane Charley, the fence was down for about a year and during the winter months, the deer used to come into our yard almost every night. When they started nudging the bird feeders, we bought a 50 pound bag of cracked corn and put it out every night and they left my bird feeders alone. The same with the squirrels and the raccoons. When there’s corn, nobody messes with the bird feeders and the deer don’t eat my roses – which are in the flowerbed lining the porch.

Obviously I haven’t gotten the corn yet this season, because this is what the ground under the Love Tree looked like this morning.

And the proof that the culprit is a raccoon? Found in the (no longer needed) sandbox sand we dumped in the yard to fill a low spot.

Little creep. I’m off to buy a 50 pound bag of cracked corn. And more safflower seeds. And more suet.

Little creep.