mouse

Can you blame me for getting distracted with this view? It is so utterly delightful watching tiny mice stuffing themselves with bird food. At first, I only noticed them on the ground, very fast and agile, moving trough garden plants and rocks cashing bits of bird food picky sparrows throw away. But recently they discovered the (additives & salt free) bird peanut butter and they love it.

They climb up through the ivy and if you sit outside and look long enough, you see several mice hanging out there waiting to feed from the peanut butter. At first, I only saw ‘large’ adult mice but last week suddenly there were these tiny newcomers, baby mice. I have babies I thought! Some people I tell about my mice say, ‘oh, be careful, they quickly become a plaque’. But I’m not at all worried about that with all the cats around here. I’m very proud the mice actually survived them and were able to successfully have young. I do try keeping the cats out of my garden, we have a happy indoor cat ourselves, but I know they do visit occasionally. I hope the mice have enough places to hide in.

I made a gallery to show a bit of mouse action. I probably won’t win a wildlife photography award with these, but I do consider myself lucky getting even these pics. They are very shy. Sometimes there are three mice in the pot sitting on top of each other, but as soon as they hear a squeak, they flee away. In the pictures you see three adult mice and in the second row the youngsters. If you look closely you can see several mice in some of the pictures.

Despite my tiny friends joyful visits, I did manage to make a sweet dog head. I’m very pleased with it. He looks much better than the drawing, more a puppy version of it and I can’t wait to finish him. Here he is in my ‘cat proof box for unfinished Popke heads’.

Unfortunately we had to cancel our trip to Switzerland. I’m a bit fed up with it but at least it had one bright side. Because we stayed home, my boyfriend saw a cat playing with a mouse in our front yard. He ran out, chased of the cat end grabbed the little mouse. The little fellow was completely in shock. We took him inside to see if he looked okay enough to put him back outside and he seemed to be. So we let him free in our, ‘cat-less’ backyard, at a sunny and sheltered spot so he could dry. He was covered with cat drool. Here’s a picture of him. (I love rodents so of course we took a picture of him)

In this picture his back looks a bit strange but it was okay. He was very scared and not sitting comfortable. On the outside it’s hard to see if the mouse had internal injuries, but seeing how he moved and acted it looked good. And, after a few hours he was gone! He survived a cat attack, let’s hope he lives to be an old little mouse! He’s a dwergmuis, dwarf mouse in English?

Now, back to crochet for the next post!