I haven’t really written a pet update since June, so I figured now would be a good time. I’ve been holding onto some photos from the past few months to share with you. We don’t currently have any rats; we’re still mourning the unexpected passing of Franc last June 🙁 Instead we’ve been busy focusing on Bonkers’ health, my health, and an accidental onslaught of fish babies…
In my last post I mentioned that Birdie has adopted my girl cave workbench as her new spot. The other night I witnessed her attempting to jump up onto it herself and realized a cat platform would come in very handy. I ended up re purposing one of the upstairs hall cat platforms.
I need to offload some of the adorable pet photos I’ve been obsessively taking over the past 5 weeks – I’ve seriously taken almost 300 photos! I have narrowed them down to my 39 favorites.
Poor Franc. He’s had a rough time of it lately. On the 10th his face was visibly swollen. By the morning of Saturday the 11th I was in full freak out mode. But thankfully after 11 days of antibiotics he’s doing so much better! But he lost part of his cheek/lip to an infection/abscess 🙁
Tuesday after work hubby and I were in the living room and he was looking out the window at the River and suddenly said “hey, what’s that? There’s something small swimming – I think it’s a beaver, but a really small one!” so we both went outside on the fish …
I have spotted the water snake sunning herself, but I have never seen her actually swimming until today! She’s about 4 feet long and quite fat – she’s obviously cleaning up with all the fish trapped in the shallow water due to the drought.
As you probably know by now, the Ipswich River water level is at an historic low. The poor turtles were getting trapped in the fish ladder, but the otters have been displaying some amazing ingenuity. Back before the drought they used the fish ladder to get from the tidal water below the dam to the fresh water above the dam. Now we’re seeing them use the storm drain system and also scaling the dam using a pile of rocks for leverage.
Due to the current drought in the Northeast, the Ipswich River water levels have been getting lower and lower. The waterfall stopped altogether over a month ago, making our house oddly silent. The fish ladder, which is directly behind our house, runs perpendicular to the dam. Because of the falling water levels, turtles started getting trapped in the fish ladder at the end of July. I rescued 5 and other people rescued a whole bunch more.
We don’t see the Great Blue Heron very often, like hardly ever. But last Friday morning Jim saw him in the river hunting fish. On Monday morning we saw him so I grabbed my new zoom lens and sat in living room window and watched him for about an hour as he stalked, caught, rinsed, and ate a fish. And shook himself dry like a dog.
