Caught this guy yesterday in the unfinished cubbyhole under the eaves in my bedroom, and I got two more in the garage!

I cleaned out my garage “barn” this past weekend and discovered an unsettling amount of mouse droppings. With a puppy and poultry, poison’s not an option. So tonight I set four traps. Nailed them in too, after reading online horror stories of captured mice dragging the lightweight traps into hidden spaces, only to die and stink to high hell. Wish me luck.

Is not for the faint of heart.

It means I spend a half an hour each evening hunting under and over each leaf, smushing my prey with my bare hands.

There’s a perverse satisfaction to it. The most fun are the fat green tomato hornworms, stupid big bullies that quickly strip leaves but deposit a pelleted trail that makes them very easy to find. With every green gut squish I am fighting the good fight as I try to stay ahead of the bugs without pesticides. However, I know things could turn bad in a day, when the tipping point between manual control and inevitable reproduction is reached.

But for right now, things are looking pretty good. I had my first harvest this week: cucumbers, yellow squash, zucchini, Japanese eggplant, red Russian kale, and great boughs of basil that went straight into pesto. It’s officially summer in the kitchen.

Thursday night I came home to a dead baby bluebird on the ground beneath the nest box. There were adult feathers about as well. The three remaining babies seemed okay.

Friday morning the remaining babies didn’t look good—and didn’t seem as vital as the night before.

When I checked the birds at lunch on Friday, two were dead and a third was weak. I removed it from the nest and it had some sort of larvae on it, which I later deduced could have been bluebird blowfly, a common parasite that often takes out the season’s second and third broods. If the chick would have been even a few days older I would have considered trying to raise it by hand, something I’ve done with pet birds and finches. But this little guy was too young. So I put him back in the nest and resigned myself to a funeral in the evening.

Last night I cleaned out the nest and put the babies in the woods for the foxes. It was a quick end, but that’s just the way it is.

One more baby bluebird born today!

Was woken at 3:00 a.m. last night by a rodeo in my bedroom. Sadly it’s not what you think—there were no cowboys.

But there was one very proud kitty who laid her still-warm, bloodless kill at the foot of my bed and then pranced and purred around me as I praised her.

I really need to finish building my house and seal up all these open areas under the eaves and around the porches. That’d probably put an end to middle-of-the-night rodeos, but then again I know Kitty is loving her new job.

Three baby bluebirds born today.

The bluebirds are at it once more, again with five eggs.

This time around I am trying to be a better bluebird hostess and check the eggs every day. I hope I will get a better sense of how the babies develop. Then when they disappear, I can more accurately determine if they fledged or were eaten.

Well, it must be summer. The snakes are out again:

I literally walked into this one in the front yard this afternoon.

After I determined that this was indeed a harmless juvenile black snake, I figured I’d use this snake to help train my farm dog. And once he noticed the snake, he knew just what to do. He went in for a sniff:

When the snake reared up and started shaking its tail, Tucker backed off but began barking like crazy.

I’ve been working with Tucker on having good judgment with his barking, and this was one case in which an extended barkfest was entirely appropriate. So I let him go for it.

After a minute or so, I stepped between Tucker and the snake, told Tucker thanks for his alert but I had the situation under control, and called him to me as I walked toward the garage. He happily left the snake and trotted to my side. When we returned to the scene of the snake less than a minute later, the snake was gone. Tucker sniffed where it had been, but was no help finding it. Vanished. What I find amazing is that among the several acres of cleared land around my house, the odds of a very fast moving four-foot long snake and five foot eight woman intersecting are pretty incredible. And yet we did.

I am very pleased with Tucker’s reaction…that he didn’t try to kill the snake but certainly knew that something was out of the ordinary and could communicate that to me. And that he left the snake when asked is a good thing too.

With the snake gone, a happy smiling puppy, proud of his good work on the farm.