Thursday, January 30, 2014

This is Why...

..our cats don't go outside to play very often, and never unattended.

For the last month or so, we've been watching a Bunny Rabbit that lives under the deck in the front of the house. Every day, we throw a little corn and bird food out onto the sidewalk. We can sit in the living room and watch as the Squirrels and the Rabbit munch away.


This morning, Nancy threw out some food like any other day. A while later, I looked out and saw a lone Squirrel nibbling on some corn. I also saw something that just didn't look right. A pair of long legs sicking out from behind a hump of snow. Not Squirrel legs... Rabbit legs. I showed it to Nancy and she thought it looked odd too. We put on our boots and went out to take a look. I'll spare you the gory Rabbit pics, but something got it.

We noticed some interesting imprints in the snow.


I laid a 4' ruler next to the clearest set of prints. The bird must have had a 6' wingspan! There's some pretty clear feather markings of the left wing and the inner half of the right one. The Rabbit must have put up a struggle, because there's at least 3 sets of wing and body imprints in the snow. It would have had to have been a huge Owl or a Bald Eagle??

Here's one of the Bald Eagles. It's in a tree less than 1/4 mile from our house. They're a common sight around here. We've heard Owls in the woods at night, but we've never seen one.