This is a great thread, and at a time I have been thinking how nice it is to have all this nature thriving just outside my door. I have: LIZARDS - many varieties in the garden. TOADS - (I've never seen a "frog" here, just lots of toads). SQUIRRELS - Almost every day I see one sitting in the bird feeder eating sunflower seeds. BIRDS - Mostly cardinals, doves, & Carolina wrens. A family of Carolina wrens live in a birdhouse behind my Austin rose, 'Heritage'. I can see both the mom & the dad feeding their babies from the window. For some reason our cat, normally a fierce hunter, just sits and watches them. She could have easily eaten all of them long ago, but she chooses to coexist with that particular bird family in our backyard. ARMADILLOS - I'm not so happy about these. They live in the woods one block away and visit the garden during the night. Each morning, I have to do damage control from their drunken parties they throw each night. Plants half-dug up, rose roots exposed to the air, big holes everywhere, their beer bottles strewn about. They will continue to visit me until this fall when there will be sufficient rain to enhance the earthworm hunting in their woods. Until then, they will go where there is regular irrigation. BUTTERFLIES - I think the penta plants, summer phlox, & alyssum bring them in. Happy weekend, Randy

Well, Gary, you have pretty much made my point for me. "Nothing much happened until these projects were undertaken." Meaning that before those projects were undertaken, no overdevelopment was underway, no rampant, unchecked growth, no overcrowding, no overpaving, no serious strain on the aquifer and no real threat to the creatures who were here before us. I agree that's true. And I wish the rush to develop Florida had been handled in such a way that those conditions were still prevalent in many more areas of the state. In my opinion, there are WAY too many people jammed into Florida today, and what has made that possible is the complete lack of foresight and planning. I don't really want to get "political" per se, either, and I agree that at this point we can't turn the clock back and undo very many of the things that were done in well-meaning but ill-advised this planet refforts to grow, grow, grow. But for me, Life on earth really ISN'T "all about people." I believe we are supposed to fit INTO the grand scheme of things on the planet, rather than tromp roughshod over it all, with no regard for other living creatures and their habitats. In other words, the more I learn about humans, the more I like animals. ;o) But truthfully, I'm willing to compromise. I know we are here to stay. I just feel we should each do our part, as best we can, to at LEAST not make things worse. And at best, to undo some of the disasterous money-making, land-grabbing, swamp-draining, canal-digging mistakes of the past. Some of those mistakes were made due to the expansionist ideas at that time in history, and some were made out of sheer greed and total disregard for anything or anyONE coming later. It's incumbent upon US today to try to decide which of these problems can be addressed and possibly corrected, and which we just have to learn to live with. We have to pick our battles wisely and try to do a better job of planning for future generations of both people and wildlife. Again, these are just my own personal thoughts on the matter, and not meant to start any kind of argument. But in my book, these three things are true: ecology is not a bad word, extremism on either side of the issue is counter productuve, and there should be plenty of middle ground to be explored when dealing with these issues. Marcia

One year later, and time for a report. In the past couple of months, I've caught eight fox squirrels, and moved them out of reach. That's about half what I caught last year. I have had zero squirrel garden damage this year, BTW. The fact that I've caught only eight (about half that of last year) means to me that I had a serious overpopulation of them last year, and that culling made a big difference. But as expected, the population grew in the spring, though never got as bad as it was last year. We had a very wet spring, and the winter acorn crop was enormous. As a result, I only caught a few in May and June. They just weren't that hungry for my bait. But just in the last two days I caught FIVE! Wham. Wham. Wham. Wham. Wham. The nuts are running out, I guess. As of now, I go outside, and I hardly see any of them at all in my yard. As I've learned, the repopulation/dispersal rate of urban squirrels is very slow. In a given year, these squirrels don't just migrate from one yard to the next. They just don't do it. I consider them cleaned out of my yard until next spring, when I'll dust off the trap and snatch a few more.

I'd like to sink/stand pvc pipes near at each corner to support a shelf or hanging rods above to expand this squirrel-free area. As long as I don't hit a pipe or cable in the ground, do you think this is a worthwhile plan? (I run the HVAC 24/7 because of cat litter boxes in house as well as high humidity.)