Critters

Mrrrrr Friends,

It has been a challenging week.

The great electrical juice maker has been inconsistent, and from time to time, Aluminum Cat and all the other blinking whirring things in the house don't work. This makes the folks pretty uptight...

Oom in particular tends to swear a lot when Aluminum Cat hibernates because the juice goes away. She's going to a bored meeting in Arizona this weekend, and she's putting all kinds of pictures in a big electric folder to show people. To be extra careful, she turns  Aluminum Cat off at night. Try as we might, Alex and me have not been able to push the tiny convex "on" button on its back.

So my blog time has been curtailed.

On the other paw, I've been having some nice outings in the mornings. No new snow in the past few days, with the weather warming and the sun out. We do now have a solid foot of packed snow, and this morning even Oom could float on itlike a snowcat. It was shiny and crystally in the sunlight, the air was crisp and my brook was loud and beautiful in the morning light.

We are all thinking spring at this point. The Goldfinches are getting their brighter yellow feathers.

We found these tracks just outside.

Mr. Raccoon I presume, from his fingers.

A little later the same morning, I found a vole working along the snow line.

I got so excited, I forgot to really do anything...not that I want to harass a little cold vole dude minding his own business outside.

Raccoons and Retrievers

It’s a fairly simple life out here. In between our people’s continuing organizing activities, Alex and I have been going outside for our supervised visits. We sniff around the house and shrubbery to suss out the various nocturnal visitors to our new home, eat a little grass, roll in the dirtiest spots we can find. I do perimeter duty every day smelling the exterior corners of the house, checking under boats, marking bushes and, if needed, plants. Alex focuses on the front yard, doing blade-by-blade analysis.

We are noting two sets of frequent visitors, besides Ricky the mailman. First, there’s Rusty Stormy, a big galoot of a Golden Retriever. Sweet enough looking for a dog, but it is fundamentally disturbing to a cat to see a dog just stroll into the yard as if he owns it. He just appears, strolling (we don’t think he moves faster than an amble) through the yard, smelling stuff as he goes. He rarely stops for any period. He is never accompanied by a person. One day Alex or I will be out there when he comes through. What will happen?

Then there’s Fric and Frac. Alex named them. They are two adult raccoons who must live nearby. We hear them but rarely see them. They make quite eerie growling sounds at night as they check to see if our neighbor has any clams in his garage. Then they come over to our house to look for the trash can that used to sit outside. Occasionally, they bring over “take out.”

Raccoons will eat just about anything. Their populations have grown as individuals have become habituated to humans, as humans have encroached more and more into remaining wooded areas, and as humans have become careless about leaving trash and other raccoon food (dog and cat food, for example) unattended outside at night.

The amazing thing about raccoons is that they have thumbs! Really. They aren’t opposable like human thumbs, but if you are wondering why they can get into almost anything – especially your feeble trash can – this is it.

We like Fric and Frac, as long as we are inside and they are out. Their thin striped faces with the large eyes remind me a bit of Alex. But a lot of folks don’t seem too fond of them. I don’t imagine they are too fond of many folks, either.