Sharing With The Night Visitors

We have night visitors to our yard. Before we built our fence we often had deer and turkeys. Now we still see them outside the fence, but there are others who come right in. We've seen a raccoon and opossum and of course rabbits.

We know that the owl visits regularly because we hear him. When Samba and I used to make our late night star gazing trips outside, we once saw the owl standing in the street. He was much bigger than I expected. We also saw coyotes in the driveway a couple times. And we'll never forget the skunk. I first saw him waddling down the street toward the house. Later that year  four of the dogs met him in the back yard and it was weeks before the stink was finally gone. I'm sure there are other night visitors that we haven't met. We see evidence of their visits on occasion.

There's a black walnut tree in the farm field beside our house and one branch hangs into our yard. Each year it drops a few nuts into our yard, but this year it went crazy and dropped tons of them. Rob has been picking up a few and putting them in the open feeder on the deck. Each day our resident squirrel pest comes by and sits on the deck enjoying one or two of the nuts, then he carries one off to his nest for a late night snack. I get annoyed with the little pest because he leaves a mess of nut shells on the deck and each day they need to be cleaned off, but it is cute to watch him open the nut and enjoy his treat.

Remember this guy? This is this year's Mr Punkman. Rob bought a very large pumpkin this year and we didn't cut it because I wanted some fresh pumpkin for the dogs.

 Yesterday we brought Mr Punkman inside and Rob cut him in half. He removed the seeds and I toasted them.

 Then he sliced up half the pumpkin and I cut the slices into bite sized chunks. I bagged them for the freezer. Half the pumpkin gave us ten bags of chunks for the dogs to enjoy for the next couple months.

 We still had half a pumpkin and I didn't want anymore chunks, so we asked a friend if he could use the other half, but he wasn't interested. Then Rob got an idea. He cut the remainder of the meat into chunks and put them in a large grocery bag. He put some of the chunks in the open feeder along with a big pile of walnuts. This would be for our bird and squirrel friends and bugs, of course.

Rob also collected enough walnuts to refill the feeder for a while.

Then he took the rest of the pumpkin chunks into the woods behind our house and  tossed them around for the night visitors. I'm sure the raccoons, possums and skunks will enjoy them. Maybe the deer and coyotes will try them too. It was a good feeling to share the bounty with the wild animals and not waste the pumpkin.