So, no more bird shooting for me. Last night I got startled just when I was about to fall asleep, by a mouse inside the walls. Last winter I had big problems with the mice, thankfully they never got in the flat but they did chew up the network cable that goes through a hole in the wall between the bedroom and living room. And my bed is next to that hole… if you’ve never had mice inside the walls, then you have to take my word that they make a lot of noise! And then when we finally baited them with rat poison, I had to endure the smell of rotting mice. So no thank you, I hope I can stop this problem before the whole mouse family moves in.
What ties this mice problem to the birds is that having a bird feeder so close to the house is an obvious attraction to the rodents. There’s a lot of natural food around the house as well so I can’t be sure if the bird feeder really is to blame, but all the seeds and nuts that the birds drop on the ground will sure help the mice to stay, once they come here. If I have to give up bird photography in order to have a mice-less winter, then that’s what I will do, so I moved the bird feeder away from the house. I’ll keep feeding the birds in any case.
So my one and only session with the birds was last Saturday. It was the first version of the setup so it wasn’t quite good yet, but at least I got a more natural picture of the Eurasian tree sparrow than I managed last year.
It was so sad to see the birds flock on the ground to pick whatever leftovers they could find, on the spot where the feeder used to be… but I’m sure they’ll discover the new location tomorrow. And I hope that the mouse has the good sense of dying somewhere else than inside the wall, assuming that it’s going to help itself to some of the leftover rat poison from last winter!