Backyard Rodents

Around September of this year, we decided to build a planter / birdfeeder with some reclaimed wood we had found. We threw in a bunch of stale popcorn and potato chips we had, and strung everything up off of a large branch in the back yard. We left a motion-activated camera pointed at it, to see what cool bird were coming by.

Well, there was maybe literally one bird which stopped by ( just to find a place to perch), but the planter / birdfeeder was a very popular attraction of various rodents that (apparently) call our backyard home.I noticed that the rats and squirrels had pretty opposite schedules, so I decided to plot it on a graph, as observed below.

rat_mouse_squirrel_graph

As you can tell, the squirrels were only active in the day, and the rats and mice were only active at night. It took a few days for the rodents to all get in on the food, and they kept their routine of checking the planter for food even a couple days after all of the food was gone.

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