Thursday, March 4, 2010

Stolen Goods Retrieved

Raccoons grab and steal the wire suet cage that I fill and hang outside for my birds -- that is, if I don't fetch it in at dusk every day. And they drag the cages up to 30 feet away, chop-shop 'em, and gobble the suet meant for my woodpeckers. Of course the little thieves don't return the empties. When the grass is tall, and the ticks, thorns and poison ivy are full blast there is no way I'm going to march through several hundred square feet of that to look for a dark-green suet cage. I buy a replacement for $1.

But today, just before everything goes green (we hope), I tromped through the brushy slope of rugged land just south of the cabin for the first time in a couple of years, looked hard, and retrieved three missing suet cages in various stages of decay. I plan on marking them with neon-orange tape so that when raccoons make off with them they won't take four years for me to find. Needless to say they were all very very suet-free.

1 comment:

Pablo said...

I've never had anyone disturb my suet cage, but sometimes that even includes birds.

I marked part of a property line with orange tape once, and when I returned, the tape was gone. (I thought at the time that my neighbor had objected to where the line ran and took it down.) A year or so later a large tree blew down, and there inside the cavity was all of the missing tape. Some critter had used it to line a soft nest.