Nocturnal Visitors to the Garden

Earlier this summer I had some weird things happening in my garden. I’d go out in the morning to weed and large pieces of carpet that I used to smother out weeds would be moved. They would be tossed or pulled aside from where I had them, but they would also be laying in such a way as to not harm any of the plants in the garden. In fact, the plants didn’t appear to be disturbed at all. If the wind, my children, or an animal had moved the carpet I doubt they would have taken such care as to not disturb anything growing. Which brings us to the question, What is moving the carpet?

Obviously I can’t keep my eyes on the garden 24/7. The next best thing is to get a camera that will. After some trial and error of where to place the camera and how to get the right angle we finally figured it out. The only downside to our chosen location is that birds like to fly in front of the camera, triggering it to take lots and lots of pictures, but the birds fly across the frame so quickly that you rarely see them. This just gives us about 1000 almost identical pictures of garden with only slight differences in the vegetation if there is a breeze.

The camera did pick up sheep in the garden during the night when some child left the gate open. It also showed them in the garden in the evening and in the morning before I discovered. Those 3 trips to their favorite buffet effectively took out about 80% of the garden. Once again I am hoping that enough will come back for me to get a harvest.

Sheep haven’t been the only nocturnal visitors to the garden, though. I also saw our cat coming and going a couple of times. I like seeing him anywhere that I don’t want mice. He’s a good mouser. I just have to make sure he doesn’t mistake my garden boxes for big litter boxes.

Then there was the black and white striped visitor that I just saw on the camera from two nights ago. We live in the country so skunks aren’t unheard of, and we’ve seen a few around our place in the past. We’ve also smelled their unique aroma occasionally when we’ve had the windows open at night. Needless to say this was a visitor that I was not happy to see, and I’m glad I didn’t see him in person. I’m also incredibly grateful that our dog didn’t find him.

Since it was late in the evening when I was going through the pictures and noticed our visitor we won’t be doing anything until tomorrow. My father-in-law has a couple of small animal traps and we will set one up and hopefully catch the little guy before he causes any problems. The last thing we need is for him to set up his burrow in one of the kid’s forts and have them go to play and get a nasty surprise. Hopefully we can catch him quickly and nobody get a smelly surprise. Skunk smell is just about the worse thing out there.