It's Every Munk for Himself

Don't Talk with Your Mouse Full

This year, we have more critters than ever. We fed them all winter. Forty-pound bags of millet and whatever else they put in those sacks. I lug them into and out of the back of the car. One more mouse and we will break last year’s record of nine captured.

Catch and release is what we do here. Some say we have caught the same mouse nine times. I keep an open mind. My rule is to call for the traps when I see one, or evidence of them. Two years running it has been the spotting. These are not messy mice, or mouse, depending on whose story you are believing.

Outside, thankfully, is where most of the action is. Two hungry ground hog babies are still alive out there, expanding their headquarters underneath the back deck. I hope the whole house does not fall into the excavation. They do not even try to move the dirt away from the entrance.

The evicted chickadees have returned with babies to the feeder. The wrens that replaced them abandoned the house without laying an egg and moved on. The new act this year is the solitary chipmunk who has figured out how to jump onto the bird feeder. Today it was the squirrels on the railing, ground hogs in the pot below it, and the chipmunk and a sparrow on the feeder together. Quite an eyeful.

This agency is part wildlife refuge, and home for duffers looking for sliced golf balls in the poison ivy between us and the fourth fairway. Six balls have penetrated the buffer this season already. That’s par for the course here. As the season goes on the drives tend not to stray from the fairway as much as they do in the spring, but I keep looking. The sound of speeding balls shredding oak leaves is a bit frightening.