We have a yard rabbit whom we call…drum roll…Peter. I know. Rabbits probably hate that. But Peter he is, and the other night as I was reading in bed, I was pretty sure I heard the very HORRIBLE sounds (and I mean HORRIBLE) of Peter fighting for his life. We’ve had eastern screech owls around our house before, and I figured one of them was eating Peter for breakfast, although it sounded like Peter was fighting as hard as he could to not be on the menu. Dorothy heard it and came running; Posy heard it and jumped up from her sleep, and I texted Sean who was downstairs and thus perhaps able to stop the carnage. He turned on our new backyard light, but whatever slaughter occurring was in the neighbor’s yard, and by then he could just hear a strange clicking noise.
Anyway, the whole thing was very traumatic to hear, and I even thought a bit about moving back to the city, where the only carnage is mano a mano, but lo and behold two days after the Horrific Event, we looked out the window and saw:
Well, you can’t see it, really, but that brown dot in the yard is Peter, happily munching on dandelion leaves. Huh. I decided to research the matter, and being a modern gal, I did what one does, which was to youtube “animals screaming in the night” and then play the videos until I found a match. It turns out that raccoons will make sounds like a rabbit being horribly dispatched by a hungry owl. I’m not sure why they make these sounds. We did once see a big granddaddy grizzled raccoon walking on the other side of our fence one foggy morning, so perhaps he was having a bad night?
At any rate, Peter is safe for now, although it is beginning to be a pain making sure that he isn’t out there before we let Dorothy out into the yard. She did chase Peter once, but then Sean called her off and she came back to the house.
On another note, Plum has not been having any spraying issues, but that is no doubt because I have been keeping him drugged on clomicalm. (Or some such name that ends in -calm.) It’s like I operate a methadone clinic: while I wash the dishes each night Plum lines up behind me to get his hand-out wrapped in a pill pocket and then happily scarfs it down. He thus spends a lot of time sleeping. Here he is on the chair in the sunporch, before and after he decided to rearrange the cushions.
And on to strange: we had a gift bag sitting on the stairs for a day or so, waiting for someone to take it upstairs and put it with the other such bags and wrapping paper, etc., and last night when Sean went upstairs past the bag he noticed this:
Posy is not one to let a nice fancy bag go to waste!
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