Post your yard and pond visitors

[BobDE]

I found this fellow down on my shoreline a couple of years ago. Looking for a snack!

 

[corgi]

Pair of Pileated woodpeckers

Male - red stripe on jaw line

Female - no red stripe

Fat rat

Eagle

 

[Mike in Vermont]

Awesome wildlife pics!

 

[Burd]

nice pics

 

[addy1]

The pond breather is slightly tilted, making a nice puddle of water for the birds to drink.

 

[JBtheExplorer]

European Goldfinches were here today for the first time since summer.

 

[JamieB]

I’ve been feeding the birds. Cardinals, sparrows, Finch, and not sure about a few others. It’s now their favorite spot to hang out. And it lets the cats sit in the window just watching them.

 

[corgi]

https://soundcloud.com/belleswell%2Fgone

 

[JamieB]

I refuse to tolerate beaver in my pond! Pretty sure my dogs won’t let one move in either, but if one did, I’d be out making it move!

 

[JBtheExplorer]

I refuse to tolerate beaver in my pond! Pretty sure my dogs won’t let one move in either, but if one did, I’d be out making it move!

Looks like a muskrat, but I can't tell for sure.

 

[JamieB]

The one where it’s swimming looks like a thick dark tail like a beaver to me, but I’ve never seen a muskrat, so maybe! I don’t think we get those here, but we do have beaver, and occasionally they cross our property, going from the river to the creek, so I could find one in my pond some day. At which point I plan to very vigorously remove it, and in such a way they find my pond unwelcoming.

 

[corgi]

It's one very fat muskrat. I normally trap them out of the pond. I removed 3 with traps last year, and about 15 the year prior. This one
is trap shy, and I've missed on multiple occasions with my pellet gun. Because I've missed so many times on this guy, I've decided to let
it go for the winter. I'll remove him/her this spring with a combination of 3 submerged colony traps or the 22.

In the mean time, he/she has a helpful benefit of chewing on the newly forming ice by shore. I have two aerators in the pond. You can see the action of one of them in the photo with all of the deer and turkeys. I purposely have one going in the shallower water here to keep the shoreline free of ice in this spot. It gives any wildlife that may fall in a place to get out of the pond.

The muskrat likes to get at the vegetation along that stretch of shoreline so it keeps it open by chewing on the ice here, which saves me the work of using my ice spud to free up the little bit of ice that may start to form here. I want to make sure that any critter that falls in the pond has an easy out. So for the winter at least, he/she is my helper.

It's the same muskrat I have a couple more pics of toward the bottom of of the prior page 43.

 

[addy1]

Do they chew through the bank? That would be my only worry about them. We have none here. I have only had deer and a ground hog fall in. Both got out.

 

[corgi]

I'm sure this one has a den or two with exits as well. They usually dig below the water line under the bank. Then they will dig up to have a land exit hole. There are 3 dens I'm aware of that they use. We've watched the Bald Eagle stalking one of these muskrat dens last spring.
I believe it got one as there was some blood on the shoreline where the muskrat would enter or leave the den just under the water line.

Barred Owls will get one now and then as well. This time of year, they will not be digging dens as the ground is frozen. Ice out is when they start to get serious about new digs.

We also have the ground hogs and a ton of deer. The above photo with a bakers dozen of deer was only about half of them. There were others to the right and left of the shot.

 

[addy1]

The most deer we have seen in our yard was around 20 plus that tracked through the back field. Our normal herd size is around 10 more less. We get a ton of babies.

At least yours is not a liner pond, that would be horrible to have a muskrat chew through to make a den.