I’ve lost count of the slings and arrows that can derail a gardener’s quest for a backyard Eden. Some are inevitable; others seem almost biblical in their determination to thwart us. This column is about those battles as we try to live in harmony with the animal kingdom — and the creatures that have other ideas.
This summer alone brought more than its share of garden dramas. It began with a yellow jacket nest beneath the deck, where our granddaughter suffered the misfortune of two painful stings. Then something started helping itself to the tomatoes, leaving half-eaten fruit scattered through the vegetable patch as if to taunt us. But my worst nightmare was yet to come. Our pair of beloved parakeets became prey to some unknown predator hunting under cover of darkness.
At times it feels as though we’re living in Widow’s Bay — the Apple TV+ series about a cursed New England island — where you never know what unsettling surprise awaits around the next corner.
Let me back up.
After discovering the yellow jacket nest, I called pest control. To keep the parakeets well away from the insecticide, I moved their cage into the greenhouse for the night, closing it up except for one open window to provide ventilation.
At 3:45 the following morning, I was jolted awake by a crash that sounded as though a body had fallen through the trees. I lay there listening, unable to identify the source, and waited until first light before investigating. What I found was devastating. Feathers were strewn across the greenhouse, the cage had been torn completely apart, and our parakeets were gone. Whatever entered the greenhouse had done its work with shocking speed and violence.
This wasn’t the first time our little patch of paradise had turned into a crime scene.
Two years earlier, my husband had carefully incubated several chicken eggs, and the chicks had grown into healthy, productive hens. They spent their days happily free-ranging, scratching for insects and dust bathing in the sunshine. Each evening, we rounded them up before dusk and ushered them safely back into their run.
Except one evening, four of them — all Barred Rocks — decided to ignore curfew. After repeated attempts to coax them home, we reluctantly gave up and secured the henhouse for the night.
The next morning, we found feathers. Lots of feathers. Three separate piles scattered across the property, but not a single body. It looked as though the earth had simply swallowed them.
The next morning, while my husband was doing some carpentry on the back deck, he caught movement out of the corner of his eye. One bedraggled hen cautiously emerged from the underbrush. Somehow, she had stayed hidden through the night and survived the attack.
She is still with us today, joined by five other hens. The difference is that none of them free-range anymore. They now spend their days in a spacious enclosed run where they have plenty of room to scratch, forage and stretch their legs. Some lessons are learned the hard way.
We have a few suspects: raccoons, fisher cats, owls, deer — and perhaps most likely, a fox. So far, there have been no bobcat or coyote sightings, although that hardly means they aren’t passing through. Woodchucks are plentiful here as well, and while their crimes are usually misdemeanors rather than felonies, one of them may well be the tomato thief.
Several years ago, while we were away sailing for the weekend, a friend was feeding our pets when she spotted deer raiding our little orchard. She photographed them standing on their hind legs, stretching their necks skyward like giraffes to reach the apples. It was an astonishing sight, and a reminder that wildlife is endlessly resourceful.
I’m already bracing myself for the annual raccoon invasion when the grapes ripen. Our vines climb over a trellis beside the deck, and in years past I’ve witnessed what can only be described as bacchanalian gatherings beneath them. One night, around two in the morning, two young raccoons tumbled through an open skylight into the house. Their frantic mother, crying outside the back door, was what woke me. The youngsters were desperately trying to climb back out to her, and I helped by removing the window screen so they could scramble to safety. Apart from one rather macabre discovery — an adult raccoon caught when a skylight closed — the encounter ended without further harm. These days, the grapes still grow, but the skylights are firmly shut every evening. Some precautions are simply non-negotiable.
As maddening as these encounters can be, they’ve also made me curious. I want to know who shares this little corner of the world with us. We’re installing wildlife cameras behind the house in hopes of identifying our nocturnal visitors. Raccoons, fishers, owls, foxes, woodchucks — they’ve all been seen here at one time or another. Then there’s the large burrow beside the compost pile. Who lives there? A woodchuck? A fox? Something else entirely?
Perhaps this is the next chapter in my gardening education. I may yet become a small-scale David Attenborough, documenting the secret lives of the creatures that believe my garden belongs to them as much as it does to me.
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” – Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5
The Seaside Gardener
By Laura McLean