Today at the lottie. A biggish hole going under the shed, must be a rat but..... a bit too big for that. Later I walked around the flower part and in the middle of the woodchip path was a bump with a big circle of scratching around the pile of chips. When I had a closer look to see what it could be I noticed something like thin, yellowish french bean looking things. No, not beans............. toes! Long yellow toes. Cripes, they were the toes of a water fowl I don't know the English name for it. They are black with a white spot on the face and they have enormous feet. Something burried it and I don't think rats do that.
Last spring, my partner Clint saw an ermine moving her babies to a different spot in the lottie complex, making many trips back and forth. I wish I was there at the time, would have loved to have seen it. I wonder if our mystery guest could be an ermine. I guess they don't do any harm to the garden so we'll just leave it.
The bird is possibly a coot. All black feathers with a white patch on the head?. Stoats are not that big, to carry off and bury a bird like that. Do you have foxes in your area? They certainly dig in under sheds in Britain and bury food for later.
No, no foxes here. Weasel?
Ina....perhaps it's BeerBelly's idea of a practical joke!!! ;D ;D
Not guilty !
How can you tell the difference between a stoat and a weasel ?
A Weasel is weasily recognised but a stoat is stoatally different ! I Thaaaankyou !
(Actually if I remember correctly a stoat has a black tipped tail and a weasel doesn't - am I right ?)
Tasteless as it may be, when you said about long yellow toes, it made me think of that awful thing in the Lord of the Rings - Grollum or whatever it's called!
I just get rustlings in the bushes on my lottie, which I presume are rodent-based - I'm ignoring them as I ahve a bit of a fear of them and if I can't see them then they aren't there!
Yes Eric, it is a dead coot. Funny thing, in Dutch it's koet which is pronounced exactly the same.
BB, I really like that rhymey thing, very clever.