we received a special request to make some chicken soup for someone going through a rough patch. happy to oblige, of course, though i did warn her that our super delicious soup starts with broth made with chicken feet. i think she thought i was joking.
no joke – beautiful broth begins with chicken feet!
and, no, these feet do not belong to any of The Girls. we get bags of feet from our local, amish source for organic meat birds.
the warmest day of spring yet with the temperature reaching just shy of 80°F create the perfect conditions in our still flowerless flower beds for a dust bath and the The Girls need no one to tell them to settle in for a Lazy Sunday of Lounging in the dirt to help control mites.
we kept a large bin of ash for them to take baths over the winter but they never seemed very interested in it. i guess maybe it just didn’t compare to a rolling around in real dirt.
chickens can sometimes have a reputation for not being particularly nice to each other but The Girls really get along quite well and it’s amusing to watch them laying all over each other enjoying the day in the dirt.
i was feeling Quite Confident after catching The Angry Squirrel that i would soon be living free of the vermin in my roof. The Handy Man who helped us put the live trap in place is coming back in a few days to repair the damaged soffit and fascia so all i need to do is keep the squirrels out until then. easy enough, right?
turns out, perhaps unsurprisingly, that we have some mighty determined vermin. this morning i discovered the previously trapped and released Evil Squirrel ripped apart the soffit around the live trap to get back into his little home.! i guess i don’t know for sure if it was the same one, so maybe i shouldn’t be so quick to judge. regardless, This. Means. War.
so, i did my own homegrown soffit and fascia repair in advance of proper repairs by The Handy Man. i expect he’ll get a chuckle out of my work when he has to remove about 30 screws out of the two layers of boards i put up.
i set the trap and wait. is Evil Squirrel even up there? will i get the satisfaction of looking him Eye To Eye?
i don’t have to wait too long to get my answer.
well, heeeelllloooooooo Evil Squirrel!
truth be told, i don’t think it’s the same squirrel i released the other day. this one has gnarlier teeth. what to do with him? odin and pushkin definitely have different opinions. pushkin would like to have him for dinner, but odin thinks we should just let him go to be with his family.
so that’s just what i did.
we’ll see if i regret the decision tomorrow.
about six weeks ago we discovered something had gotten up in our roof and i wondered about how you remove a critter from an inaccessible section of a roof? i tried plugging the hole with vinegar soaked socks ( didn’t work ). and steel wool pads ( nope ).
i even stapled a long length of window screen around the hole with a metal bar attached thinking if i made it tougher for the critter to get in and out it it would just leave. it just chewed through the screen.
finally, i decided to try the most suggested suggestion given by folks who had said they tried everything else. a “live trap”. i guess i would have tried a live trap to start out, but i couldn’t figure out how to easily rig it to the side of the house given where the hole was in the soffit and fascia and how the trap door mechanism opened and closed.
so, i temporarily turned in my handyman card and had a local fit-it guy come over and put it all together.
and in very short order, we trapped One Very Suprised and Angry Squirrel!
of course, The Girls were Mighty Interested in just what on earth was causing all the racket in the cage. they quickly gathered around clucking loudly, “SOMETHING’S DIFFERENT! SOMETHING’S DIFFERENT!”
i contemplated various ways of disposing of or relocating the squirrel, but in the end i just decided to let him go in our yard. we have hordes of squirrels living in the three 120 foot spruce trees in our backyard.
i mean, he’d probably be grateful and never return to the roof again? right?
stare for hours out the window at The Girls, he does.
i am stronger than his jedi-mind-trick-stare-down power. mostly.
maybe he doesn’t really want to eat them? or, then again, maybe he does.
[ ragsy came to us “declawed”, so he doesn’t get to go outside as there are too many clawed cats in the neighborhood that would like to tear him to shreds ]