Muffets and Tuffets

Most of the barn mice come to the breakfast bar, grab a bite and either duck back down into their burrows or sit by the pile of grain and watch me.  And now there's Miss Muffet.  She paws through to find the choicest morsel, then takes it over to her favorite corner to sit on her tuffet and nibble.  She does this over and over every day.

I'm always in wonder at how little creatures who live underground manage to have such clean, shiny coats.  Scruffy seems to be the victim of poor parenting.  His fur goes every which way and looks slightly dusty, the result of faulty grooming.  He isn't well accepted by the clans, so he's a little timid when he comes to eat.  Scruffy is definitely one of the grab-and-run guys.

The turkeys come running every morning for birdseed when I call, "Turk, turk, turk."  Lately, a grey tree squirrel races to the feeding station when he hears me call and thumps his front feet while he's waiting for me to put the seed down.  I guess squirrels are short on patience.  This particular guy has a growth on his jaw just under his ear.  Somehow I never thought about wild things getting tumors, etc., but of course it must happen now and again.

Pom-pom is a ground squirrel who shows up down in the barn.  He either got in a fight or an accident, because he lost hair in a ring around his tail, leaving just a tuft at the end.  Sure makes him easily identifiable.  He's determined to help himself to the little pile of grain put down for the barn birds.  I can't do much sitting on the milking stand but clunk my feet together to scare him off.  It's worked so far, but he's getting bolder.  It's not like I don't put down breakfast for the squirrels before I leave the barn; I do.

I'm hearing the first morning yeeps from the chicks.  As soon as it dries out some, they've got to move out to their pen.  They're big enough now that one of them flew out of the cage yesterday while I was putting down fresh feed and clean water.  It was better that I caught her before Ralph could.

And that's the way it is on Farview Farm today.