Return of the Mystery Pruner?

We've had a volunteer rose bush that grows in the planter beside the garage.  Cindy periodically cuts it back and tries to dig out the roots, but it persists and eventually reappears, as it did this year.  It wasn't high on the gardening priority list, but this morning I noticed that most of the canes had been raggedly chopped back, most of them about 5 or 6 inches off the ground.  

Just A Couple of Sticks

And One Long One

One cane was still about a foot long, and one small one had been left completely alone.  None of the other plants showed any sign of damage at all.  I thought it might have been a skunk because I had noticed a kind of skunky smell in the area, but Cindy pointed out that the plant about two feet away is called Skunk Plant for a very good reason--that's what it smells like.  When the leaves are disturbed, it smells very much like a skunk has passed by recently.  

So what kind of critter eats rose canes?  And apparently nothing else.  The last time we had a critter "prune" some of our citrus plants, we eventually concluded it must have been a deer.  See http://plantagarden-itllgrowonyou.blogspot.com/2012/01/new-garden-mystery.html  Even though we live in a city of 1.3 million people, surrounded by freeways, deer do sometimes come down the San Diego River, sometime with startling results.   https://plantagarden-itllgrowonyou.blogspot.com/2013/01/yes-deer.html

I'm finding it hard to believe that deer would be such selective eaters that they would prefer a few rose canes to whole garden beds full of tomatoes, green beans, eggplant and other veggie delights.  And although Cindy's anti-varmint panels have been very good protection against the ravages of the California Ground Squirrel population, I don't think they would stand up to a determined deer.

It's still a mystery.  

Mite Busters!

On June 5th, Cindy heard what she thought was a "nesting song" sung by the House Finches.  The next day, twigs started appearing on the beam over our front porch--the porch we had only reclaimed three weeks before from the previous nesting experience.  On June 7th, she saw two female finches apparently fighting over the nesting material on the beam.  Or maybe it was Mama and Papa Finch finishing the nest.  By June 8th, Mama seemed to have settled into the nest and begun to incubate the eggs.  

Location, Location, Location!

We sighed and resigned ourselves to using the back door and having our happy hour on the back patio instead of on the front porch in the afternoon for at least the next month while the birds incubated and hatched their eggs.  

Finally, after about two weeks, we saw Mama Finch poking around in the nest, and a couple of days later saw two little fuzzy heads poking up above the rim of the nest and both Mama and Papa feeding the two chicks.  

By July 1st we were seeing at least three heads and hearing cheeping, but it was several more days before any of them had real feathers.  We were never sure how many eggs and chicks there were in the nest, and they just seemed to keep coming.  Finally the chicks began to leave the nest one by one.  One of the adult birds would sit in the shrubbery across the driveway or on the porch railing chirping at them.  Then both adults would fly up to the beam, fly back down, back up, back down, back up, and eventually one of the chicks would fly off with both parents.  It took several days, but by Friday at dinnertime there was only one chick left, standing on the very edge of the nest looking a bit lonely.  By the time we got up in the morning, the last one had flown.  

So we were "empty nesters" again, but we were determined to not make the same mistake we made last time:  then we waited a couple of days before we took down the nest, wore masks and gloves but no other protective gear and didn't go in and take showers right away.  Bird mites live on birds, and when there are no birds around, they look for another host:  us.  Cindy got the worst of it, with about forty mite bites, and the remaining mites continued to bite us for about three weeks before they all died off.  This time we were ready for them.  We ordered some Tyvek suits with hoods and wore them with gloves and masks.  We looked like space aliens, or something out of Ghostbusters.

Who Was That Masked Woman?

Cindy climbed up the ladder and sprayed the nest with a miticide solution several times before we took the nest down.  Then we sprayed the porch and porch furniture to make sure we got them all.  Then we went in, threw our clothes in the washer and took showers.  

Space Aliens in the Neighborhood????

Our neighbor across the street took this picture of the two of us as we were cleaning up.    

We've always tried to live by Mr. Bennett's dictum in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, "For what do we live but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?"