They have been meant for the birds and the bees: a pair of dwarf sunflowers whose vivid heads shone up at my kneecaps. Summer season ran based on plan, the vegetation abuzz with bugs sipping on their shops of nectar. When yellow and inexperienced browned into autumn, the sunflowers’ edible faces matured, every disc like a compound eye, solely filled with seeds. We thought then that we might reprise their summer time colors by attracting greenfinches and goldfinches to feed on them. We lower down the stems and laid them outdoors the patio doorways, aiming to string them up for the birds that weekend.
For the subsequent two mornings, studying over breakfast was interrupted by a motion within the nook of my eye. Although I searched the patio, I couldn’t spot the elusive chicken. A wren, I half-decided. On the second morning, my spouse, Sarah, referred to as me downstairs to sit down on the patio window and look ahead to the invisible wren. After a couple of minutes, it appeared from behind a flowerpot, halting like a nervous actor on the curtained edge, afraid of stepping out onstage. Not a wren, however a wooden mouse, with bulging blackcurrant eyes and large spherical ears on a tiny physique, the accentuated options of a nocturnal rodent that, proper now, was profiting from a diurnal feast. Or moderately a feast deferred, for it was quickly evident that this mouse was amassing to cache.
It scampered out in the direction of the sunflowers in a loping run, its whitish legs and ft a scissored blur, trailing the thinnest of tails, then stopped in entrance of 1 disc, raised itself on its hind legs and gnawed one of many seeds out of the sunflower’s face, earlier than whipping off again behind the flowerpot. Twice extra we watched it race and wrestle a seed from the sunflower, returning to the ivy-roofed border, the place it might run with the voles amongst a tangle of logs and branches, and fill its burrowed tunnels with provides for winter.
As for the goldfinches, they’ve a stand of knapweed, whose stems can not bear the load of even the lightest mouse.
