We’ve been having a problem at night on the farm. Everything seems fine when we go to bed, but when we wake, things are in disarray.  My garden gnome is knocked over, the suet cage (not just the suet, but the whole cage) is missing, and someone has sprung the clasp on the top of the holder that houses the dried ears of corn for the squirrels.

When things first started to happen, we blamed the deer, so we moved the suet cage higher on the tree, and bolted it in tighter, and put an alligator clamp on it to keep the contents secure. It didn’t matter.  Things continued to go missing.

So we got a trail camera with night vision.

It captured us walking around the farm doing our daily chores – headed to the chicken coop, filling the bird feeder, but rarely would it catch anything unusual. We moved it several times to capture different vantage points, and finally… we got some action.

The deer do roam the farm at night. It’s not unusual to see several at dusk or dawn – maybe five, sometimes eight… but we never see the bucks, except on our night vision camera.  Apparently we have a six-point buck and another buck that we call “Fifty-cents.”  He appears to be just half a buck.  He only has one tall, gangly antler.  While they seem to graze under the birdfeeder, they weren’t climbing the tree to steal the suet.

The suet thief sneaks in at night with his burglar’s mask across his eyes, scopes out the area, climbs the tree and with his incredible dexterity, helps himself. Yes, Rocky Raccoon thought he had a good thing going.  But the suet is for the birds, not Rocky.  Chris moved the suet to a free-standing pole with a hook on the end.  It swings from its chain and the birds don’t seem to mind the new venue.

Rocky, however, isn’t so pleased with the arrangement. He (or she) has taken up pole dancing in an attempt to shimmy up the pole.  But it isn’t working.  The gnome still gets toppled some nights in the melee, but the suet is safe – until Rocky out-smarts us again.