Under Seige / House Arrest

Well spring is here, the snow is melting, the rain is falling (off and on, mostly off, but that'll change...it's clouding over as I write this) Just in time to, as Quinn's snowpants and mitts are pretty much shredded. He looks like some kind of post toddler winter zombie. Nice that they're playing outside lots, but sheesh.

We've seen several robins now, and yesterday Les and I spotted a chipmunk rummaging around in the yard. Baxter also showed up by the screen door yesterday with a mole or some big fat mouse like thing in his mouth. Les started yelling at him to drop it and leave it alone. (right...cause cats listen so well...) He spent the next while batting it around and tossing it in the air. (four feet in the air!) I let the dog out, and although you might think that the two on one tag team would finish the poor creature, the dog really just got in the way, and soon the little... whatever it was had half scrambled half fallen down the stairs of the deck and disappeared under some gaps in the concrete. The cat is on a mission now.

He got very close to an unsuspecting sparrow at the feeder yesterday. From this angle you can't tell that the cat has a 15' fall if he leaps up to try and snatch it.
Good Lord! I just had to get up and run to the furnace room to investigate scuffling noises! Sounded like something inside the plastic piping vent which runs out side. I wacked it around a bit, and nothing, went outside with the dog and inspected it. It does have a pest screen on it, but the holes are relatively large, certaily a small mouse could climb in there. I'll have to take a closer look to figure our exactly where those sounds were coming from.

Yesterday I finally got around to climbing through the attic and putting poison here and there for the mice that are up there. You can hear them scratching and doing god knows what in the evenings. The attic is not very high, and there are supports running width wise every 16 in. I can't stand up, and I can't quite crawl underneath those supports, so I have to slowly pick my way across, high stepping over each support as I go. It's a total pain in the tuckas. Anyway there is straw and grasses in a couple of spots, right down by the eaves where it's too narrow for me to get to unless I get right down on my stomach and slither. No thank you. So I used a long stick to set the blocks of poison where the mice likely are. There is also a chewed hole in the screening of the gable vent, but I'm hoping I can fix that from the outside.

In any case, now that we're poisoning mice, the cat is under house arrest. If some doped up half dead mouse leaves the attic in search of water before it dries up we don't want the cat eating it. You might think that the mice are in the house, so that cat could just as easily find one inside as out, but there is no evidence of mice inside the house below the roof line, I've found their entrance point from the outside, (the gable vent) and there is a constant and plentiful supply of food for them outside under the bird feeder, so there is no need for them to venture down the walls.

The mice are definitely interested in the poison blocks I've distributed. This morning at 5:30 a mouse woke me up by wrestling with a block above the window by the bed. He must have loved it cause he wrestled with it for what seemed like hours.

What does all this mean? I don't know, but it seems it could be a hint of things to come, that and a neighbours warning that the frogs here are so loud in the summer that you can just about forget about sleeping for a couple of months.

I love country life!