Me Against Them

A couple of running battles are going on here, and I'm not winning. 

It wasn't bad enough that the blue jay was taking samples from the ripening strawberries.  I could cut out his beak marks and salvage a taste for myself.  Now the dirty booger plucks the whole berry and, just to rub it in, takes it up to the deck railing where I can't miss him as he stuffs it down his gullet.  Strawberries are not a fruit that one can pick early and let ripen on the counter.  The only thing the jay and I agree on is that under ripe strawberries aren't good eating.

The ground squirrels and I have had a tentative detente working down in the barn.  If they burrow up in an area where the hole causes no problem for me or the goats, I leave them be.  They outnumber me by the dozens, and I've learned to choose my battles.  When they, for their own convenience, have come up in a not-so-good area, I stuff the hole with goat poop and excavated dirt.  It might take a week of daily refills before they get the idea; then they retreat and we go back to life as usual.  An exceptionally stubborn miner has tunneled up right in the middle of the girls' sleeping area...not acceptable.  Every day I fill in the hole.  Every day there it is again.  This has been going on for a long time now.  He'll get tired before I run out of goat poop, so I think this campaign might go in my favor...some day.

And then there are the weeds.  I surrender.