The garden on 9 May 2026

It was a long and cold winter, a nightmare of a winter, and now spring weather is still cool. Usually by this time I have installed our air conditioner and it is hot outside, that's how the seasons work here, one day it's winter, the next day it's summer, but this year I am still putting on the furnace when I get up (it's only +5 C and overcast on 13 May 2026).The other day I looked out of the dining room window and there was the rabbit that visited us this winter, he was sitting in the garden and having a nice quiet time. Then a cardinal flew by and landed a few feet away from him, it scared the rabbit who ran away. There is a lot of life out there but you have to make your garden a place where birds, insects, and animals want to visit. As a Canadian writer said, "if you build it they will come." That was W.P. Kinsella. The crows are often flying overhead, sometimes they are eyeing squirrels that would make a nice meal for them. A few days ago I went out to put clean water in the bird bath--birds don't like dirty water--and everyday I leave a few unshelled peanuts in the bird bath for the crows--but this day I found something else in the bird bath, it was a squirrel's paw. Well, that's life around here, last year I saw a crow fly away carrying a dead squirrel. I am no friend of squirrels, they made life hell for a few years, there is no bird feeder here because the squirrels ate the bird food I would leave, and then the squirrels entered the attic and wanted to live there; squirrels can be squatters. The noise they made was terrible. At great expense I had their entrances closed up and that was the end of squirrels in the attic, although for a few years they would return to try to enter what had been their home, but without luck.

Squirrel paw found in the bird bath

 

 

Carnivore crows

 

Just yesterday, as we were leaving the house, I saw a crow fly over us carrying what I thought was a mouse, then he landed on our neighbour's tree and I could see what the crow had was a dead squirrel, the dead squirrels's tail hung over the side of the tree bough. A minute later the crow took off with the dead squirrel and landed in another neighbour's tree. This reminded me of something from last summer, two crows were trying to kill a young squirrel. The squirrel was terrified as he ran from one car to the next hiding beneath each car, the crows looking disinterested and obviously pretending not to care about this squirrel that would be their lunch. When the terrified squirrel made a run for it the crows followed him but each time the squirrel eluded capture and the crows would immediately act as though they were never interested in him and had never been interested in him. These crows are crafty birds, very intelligent, and with personalities, they seem to even have egos.

Earlier this spring I went out to the bird bath to change the water--birds like clean cold water--and there was a dead sparrow floating in the water, he had been pecked open by a crow. Crows are carnivores, any road kill or what they can hunt and kill is a meal to them. I flipped the dead sparrow out of the bird bath and, later, returned to change the water in the bird bath. The sparrow was gone, but I found a coin on the ground beside the bird bath; I had not seen this coin before, it was a well worn Canadian penny, dated 1957, the year after my father died; maybe the penny somehow came to the surface of the ground but it's the only coin I've found in this garden, maybe the crows left it there and if they did why did they leave it there? Is this an example of synchronicity, of a meaningful coincidence, or maybe it is just a coincidence and means nothing.  Or, maybe, we have a psychic connection to some animals and they connect us with aspects of life that we would otherwise not be aware of.