Saturday was a good day for the food chain — or bad, depending on where you are located on it.
Early in the morning out on the unplowed county road I spotted a fragment of what I assume was a deer’s leg bone, dragged to the shoulder of the road and picked almost clean.
Upon returning home, Jon pointed out a hawk perched in a serviceberry, surveying the quail scavenging sunflower seeds beneath the bird feeder. As the quail scuttled to take cover under the barberry bushes flanking our house, the hawk took action. Swooping down for the kill, it slammed into one of our kitchen windows, creating the raptor equivalent of a dog’s nose print on the pane and missing the quail.
Later, filling the wood box, I noticed two sets of mouse tracks coming from under the woodshed, each ending abruptly in a divot, with a set of wing marks etched in the snow. Quail were apparently not on the diner’s menu, but a little mouse goes down easy when you’re hungry.
Out on the ski trail, a pristine skiff of snow awaited atop the corduroy, unmarred by humans, creating the perfect canvas for a set of prominent cat tracks that crisscrossed the trail for a kilometer. Whoever was out on the prowl presumably nabbed some prey but left no evidence. After that I couldn’t shake the feeling of eyes watching me as I traversed the “cougar alley” section of Power’s Plunge.
Mid-afternoon found me at the holiday bazaar in Twisp, where I received a text from a neighbor who had just driven past my house. “Ashley, the deer are in your chicken feed.”
Somehow, the deer have figured out how to nose the lid of the feed barrel off (a lid that locks in with a twist!), giving them access to a fresh batch of Bluebird Grain Farms organic heirloom chicken scratch. One can’t really fault the deer for taking advantage of this bounty of foraging, but one can still resent them.
Or rather, one could still resent them, if one’s vindictive energy were not focused on a critter whose crimes are far more egregious than those of the deer. The flicker and my husband have a love-hate relationship, with all the love issuing from the flicker and all the hatred emanating from Jon. When Jon heads out with his air gun thingy to scare the pesky pecker away from the eaves, he even calls it his “date” with the flicker.
An encounter with a raven capped the day. Caught in the act of emerging from the chicken coop with a fresh egg in its beak, the raven merely fixed me in its beady-eyed gaze. I swear it gave a defiant little “what’re you gonna do about it?” little head bobble before it flew away.
