V is for Vermin

I used to let Norah fill the bird feeders on the porch.

Inevitably, while she was doing this, some of the seeds would fall out of the feeders and onto the porch. No big thing, I thought. The birds will still eat it off the ground.

In fact, we began to notice that some of the littlest birds seemed to prefer to eat the seeds off the porch, so we actually started "spilling" seeds on the porch on purpose.

But, it turns out that the squirrels noticed these seeds, too. And, even though they can empty our bird feeders in a day, they are, apparently, still starving to death, because you can see from the close-up photo above, that the little vermin dug out the mortar between the pieces of slate on our front porch to get to the littlest seeds stuck in the cracks.

Hence, Norah fills the bird feeders only in the grass now.

Lesson learned.