wow great items!!!! Love that rooster!!!!!!!!!

toads make a trilling sound, but so do tree frogs. Tree frogs are soooooooooo loud. I only have green frogs (besides the tree frogs), and they do the banjo thing. I would love to have more varieties. I absolutely love August, when there is such a nighttime symphony of all different kinds of beings. Speaking of the deer snorting.........my son was taking a walk at twilight the other evening and a big deer snorted just a few feet away from him. Scared my son to death! They can be sooooo loud. But its so neat to have them on our property (when they aren't eating all the plants and rubbing the little trees to death!)

Thank you bklyn-hydrangea, Vaseline is definitely worth a try; thank you for the suggestion. I haven't heard of that before. I do have a booming population of chipmunks... as well as squirrels. Those are real possibilities of my attacks. I recently have been suggested to use moth balls; anybody try that? The strange thing is, the place I have my foamflower, holly fern, and mounds of impatiens were right next to a low sitting bird bath... And after looking again, they seem to have eaten only the coral colored impatiens, not the purply or pink ones... could be just a coincidence. Could be a raccoon out in the woods... I definitely have the habitat for them....lots of den trees and fern covered creek beds. I also have been having a lot more armadillo activity...like digging out the bark of my decaying trees or digging random holes in my yard, flinging the moss and dirt feet away... big animal type stuff. I thought that my dogs would naturally repel the raccoons...but then again anything is possible. My yard is a critter paradise, which strangely enough I am proud of my organic ecosystem... but now I seem to have gotten the attention for every critter in the neighborhood! I don't mind a little activity; I would rather sacrifice a few plants and stay organic than the alternative... but I truly am being over taken this spring. Voles underground and other things above ground... they are feasting on everything I have. Fresh bobcat, fox, coyote urine don't seem to be doing a thing. I don't want to poison them... which may seem contradictory to my title of this posting... but I wish I could work with them somehow. I have been trying to plant things that are resistant to being eaten... but few things are as safely guranteed as my narcissus, alliums, or digitalis. Thanks for your response, it helps knowing I am not alone ... and willig to try new suggestions if it means saving my plants! Happy spring, Nita

Linelle - I don't eat fish (I have, but I prefer not to). I don't like to even wade in waters where they swim for fear of touching them. I have, at times, been so startled by an unexpected photo of a fish when turning the page in a magazine that I have actually thrown the magazine across the room - just an automatic response. I can't pinpoint the exact moment when this fear came on, but I was pretty small. I do remember being in a pet store when I was maybe four or five years old, and running my hand along a table full of sale items. My hand stopped on something that felt odd, and when I looked to see what it was, it was a dried-out, dead fish. Horrifying! I believe I started having fish dreams not too long after that. I'd wake up screaming in the night, certain that a fish was in the bed with me. My poor mom, being awakened at dark-thirty and having to quell the unreasonable fears of a very insistent little girl! When I was a tween, I used to like to go fishing with my grandfather when I visited my grandparents' lake house in the summer. He would bait the hook for me and take any fish I caught off the hook, and I thought it was great fun. I guess I wasn't horribly phobic at that time. One day he and I went fishing out in his boat. I caught 17 fish, and we took them home with us. My grandmother deemed them too small to fix for our dinner, so she decided to make a sort of stew out of them for the dog. She put them in a pressure cooker (I have no idea why), thinking they were all dead. Something happened and once the thing heated up, we heard hideous thrashing inside the pot. After awhile it stopped, but when she lifted the lid, there was a nasty film on top and a few eyeballs floating around. Again - horrifying stuff. The dog ate it up though. Once I told a boy in high school about my phobia, and shortly thereafter I opened my locker to find a huge dead fish inside. The boy thought that was just the funniest practical joke ever, and chased me up and down the halls holding it by the tail. I remember trying desperately to keep my cool and not show how agitated I was, but I fought not to burst into tears - or pass out. (I know this is getting to be way too long ...) A few years ago I decided that I wanted to overcome my phobia once and for all and actually sought counseling for it. I also tried to do a bit of immersion work on my own, and DH and I went to a local aquarium one afternoon. It's long been difficult for me to even get close to a fish, in any manner - even those behind glass. The salt water aquariums didn't bother me terribly; after all, those fish are often beautifully colored or comical looking. The freshwater tanks, however, caused me to panic. I forced myself to remain seated next to one that was built low to the ground with glass walls, with the various lake-living fish swimming right up to me on all sides and behind me. I couldn't do it. I sat there and just bawled and hyperventilated, and DH got me the hell out of there. Around that time we were traveling regularly to Mexico, and scuba diving was very popular where we stayed. In spite of my fish phobia, it sounded like a lot of fun, and I went so far as to take a few scuba lessons here, but did not go on to be certified. I didn't like the feeling of breathing underwater and couldn't get past a feeling of simmering panic. I know I wouldn't have made certification anyway - at least not with the instructor I had - as his group went to a local man-made lake to receive their certification, and the waters were often murky and always filled with curious fish. Pretty sure that seeing something like this would have induced dangerous panic in me! Gosh, I am sorry to have told you more than you ever wanted to know. I've not been asked about this in a long time, and I guess my memories just came flooding back!