Trash Pandas of the Night

A few nights ago I was working in my kitchen.  Nicolas Le Floch was on the telly and a batch of damson jam was bubbling on the stove.  It was a bit on the late side, but I don’t have A/C so if I’m going to heat up my kitchen I prefer to do it after the sun has set so that my attic fan can pull the cooler night air through some open windows.  Suddenly, I was startled out of my enjoyment of Jérôme Robart by the sound of breaking glass somewhere in the back garden.

I looked out of the back window but saw nothing in the dark.  A few minutes later, flashlight in hand, I carefully stepped out to explore.  To be honest, I couldn’t think what might have broken and I thought the sound might have come from a neighbour’s house. Nothing obvious seemed amiss and, since I didn’t want to burn the jam any more than I already had done, I went back inside.

The next morning, with the aid of daylight on my side, I investigated further and discovered that two of my bird feeders were down and one of them – a sort of orange glass doughnut thing – was lying on the ground in many sadly shattered pieces.  An old school friend had given me that feeder a couple of years ago, and although it was not originally a hit it was eventually adopted by the birds (chickadees first, as always) and other feeder visitors.

It had hung from the branch by a metal cable, which was nowhere to be found. Near the pieces of glass covering the ground was the second bird feeder. The rope that had held it in the tree had been snapped and its lid lay at some distance from the rest of the feeder. A nearby trash bag I had been using to clean up old seed and seed casings from under the feeders was torn open and its contents spread about.

I could come to only one conclusion: raccoons! Or maybe bears (unlikely here in town)? Possibly really heavy nocturnal squirrels?? But, no, I’m sticking with the raccoon theory, even though I have no proof that would stand up in a court of law (if you could actually prosecute raccoons, which you can’t, unfortunately). True, I have rarely seen them in my neighbourhood in all the years I’ve lived here, but they are out there. I have seen the occasional masked eye sneak a look from a storm drain and once I saw the back end of one as it made a rapid escape over the back fence, chased there by my raccoon-hating dog. I do enjoy most of the visitors to my garden but like a party host wondering how to get the drunken yahoos on their way back home, some guests are more welcome than others.

What to do?

It turns out there are a lot of helpful tips on the internet. Most of them start off with only putting as much bird seed out as the birds will eat by night fall. I don’t know about your birds, but mine seem to have varied appetites. One day they’ll eat a lot and another they’re more interested in the abundant sunflowers. If you reach the end of the day and the feeder is empty too early you can expect a lot of grief from the chickadees. So I’m going to try the next option: bringing the feeders in at night. True, the birds tend to be up earlier than I am in the morning but if I’m not awake to hear their complaints it won’t bother me as much.

Useful Link

For more useful suggestions, I quite like this page:

https://www.humanesociety.org/resources/raccoons-and-bird-feeders

All images by author unless otherwise stated.