This is how my morning began—with Riley at my bedroom door, “Mom, I think we have a baby Wood Chuck in our garage. I saw something scurry across the garage floor and it screamed at me.”
Yes, Ground Hogs/Wood Chucks can scream. As we are learning, living on our wild property, most animals and birds scream; like the fox at 3:38 a.m. this morning which was yelling outside the chicken coop door. “I’m hungry! Let me in! I’m going to keep screaming ’til someone opens this door!”
Or the owlets in the middle of the night when their mommas are teaching them to hunt but they don’t want to fly with their momma. An owelet is very defiant when it sits and screams at its momma to come back for it.
Or the chickens when the raccoons have once again broken into the coop during the late night hours. Oh the sound of chickens alerting us while the coons scream at them to be still like a good little dinner.
Or the squirrels when a Great Horned Owl is attacking their nests in the middle of the night and eating the pesky little squirrels limb by limb. This is the worst scream of all!
Or the skunk when I take our dog out late at night in the dark and catch Mr. Skunk off guard. Loud scream but fortunately no spray. Very thankful!
Here is the Little Mister Riley found this morning.
What a cute tail!
Oh…cuteness overload. Just don’t bite us while we try to help you out of our garage.
It tried tunneling home—all the way up 10 feet of insulation in the garage. Now we know Ground Hogs can climb; in fact, it climbed on every shelf and surface in the garage and knocked over anything in its path.
We attempted to use a broom, a flag pole and loud noise to coax the little mister/critter out of the garage but he was sooo scared.
“I’m hiding and you can’t see me. That’s not my nose.”
“Those aren’t my whiskers. You can’t see me.”
“Okay, you found me. I’ll go find my old hiding spot in the insulation.”
Three minutes later…
“You definitely cannot see me here. I shall stay here all day.”
“They found me again but I refuse to leave. Where is my mom? I want my mommy.”
“Hey, I forgot to thank you for all the ‘Johnny on the Spots’ you keep conveniently located in your garage. I made good use of them—all of them.”
“And these GIGANTIC Burr Oak Acrons—delicious! I didn’t have to go with out food all night. Thank you for thinking of me.”
Sniff, sniff. I might shed a tear over this discovery. These were the giant Burr Oak acorns I was going to use for decorating purposes. Little Mister had several meals by the looks of things.
Riley and I realized we were getting nowhere with the little mister who was too scared to leave the garage so we went inside and left the garage door up for Little Mister to escape.
A few minutes later Little Mister was letting out screams of distress to his momma in hopes that she would come find him. Hopefully it worked since I haven’t heard a scream in over an hour.
Now I will go clean up all the ‘Johnny on the Spots’ Little Mister used. I was kind and didn’t take pictures of those but then I realized not everyone speaks sarcasm as fluently as me. So for those of you who didn’t understand…
‘Johnny on the Spot’
Little Mister’s ‘Johnny on the Spot’
Puddle on the left. Black dodo on the right. Garden tools on the floor which means Little Mister climbed the wall and knocked the gardening tools off their hooks.
Ugh! I really did not want to spend an hour of my day cleaning in the garage.