Yesterday I again observed “our” wasteful chickadees tossing 2 or 3 sunflower seeds on the ground for every one they carried from the feeder. Normally this makes our resident grey and red squirrels happy, but since the snowstorm, they have been hiding out somewhere and didn’t take part of the bounty.
So I decided to take the feeder inside late afternoon and let the chickadees, nuthatches, and goldfinch clean up the several hundred seeds that were on the ground. They diligently applied themselves to this work as you can see in the two photos below.
If you examine these photos, you can see an animal has cleverly made its home under the endless supply of food. Note the tunnel hole at the top right. Perhaps a mouse? I was determined to capture it on film.
The afternoon progressed to dusk. Finally around 5:40 the animal emerged, quickly grabbed a seed, and almost instantaneously disappeared back into its hole. I got a number of photos at ISO 3200, f/5.6, 1/60 sec. Two are below. Turns out it was a Northern Short-tailed Shrew.
This shrew moved fast. To give you a feel for how fast, the slide show below shows a sequence with less than 1/2 second elapsing from the first to the last shot.
This morning I found lots of tracks in what was untrampled snow the evening before. Seems other critters were enjoying the bounty. Can you identify the tracks? If you can, please send me an email.
By 8:45 American Goldfinches were still cleaning up the mess. Soon thereafter I replaced the feeder so the adventure could start anew.
