Snowy Range and Facts of Life

 On Monday of this week, Memorial Day, we drove over the Snowy Range to see the snow.  The road is always closed during the winter, but the goal is to get it opened for the holiday.  It officially opened last Saturday and this was taken out of the car window.  Some of the plowed sides were over the roof of the cars.  The snow we had a couple of weeks ago left my birds and little bunny scrounging for food.  This little bunny may be a Pygmy which is a protected species. He has been here all winter and spent much of it under the pine tree.  He is much smaller than the cottontail or the jackrabbit and is pretty tame actually.

With the warm weather now we have the National Guard and volunteers sand bagging as the River has reached flood stage and there is water everywhere along the banks.  Some ranch land is flooded and it is strange to see so much green grass everywhere.

Now my Coalette, who has been a house cat until recently has become quite the mouser, which really surprises me.  She doesn't seem to stray far from the fenced yard as there is so much tall grass and sagebrush to explore.  In addition to bringing the rather large mole in a few weeks ago, she has had at least 3 kills since.   I found a dead mouse out by the storage shed and we discovered her licking her chops and a couple of bloody spots on the patio by the back steps and this morning we found her playing with a dead mouse.  Realizing that this is part of living out here in the range land, we have coyotes, cattle, eagles, hawks, weasels, bear, moose, antelope, deer, ticks, osprey, goats, prairie dogs, ground squirrels, all kinds of birds and other small creatures.  People keep barn cats to keep down rodents. So this morning, she was flipping this dead mouse up in the air, batting it around, tossing it across the patio and the Mr. finally took it away from her, but it was apparently a nursing female.  As a child, we had animals and had a granary so we had cats as mousers.  I remember my dad taking me out to the garage to show me a nest of baby mice.  I still remember the small wriggly pink things, new babies without their eyes open even.  He explained to me that they would not be allowed to live as they destroyed grain, multiplied by the dozens and carried lice and fleas.  As part of the reality of life, he told me he would have to drown them and as a child then, I understood it to be necessary.  When I saw that this was a nursing mother mouse, it brought back that memory.  I also know that my Coalette could be prey for the Bald Eagle which perches every day in the tree south of us. I am hoping that she will become wise enough to stay close to the house, but it is natural for her to hunt now and that is a fact of life.