"Honey?"

I called from the porch into the house, "Why is there dog food in the birdhouse?" When geeks live together, it's best to ask questions first before messing with something that appears to be an experiment or otherwise out of the ordinary. I was hosing bird droppings off the front porch, a.k.a. "the poop deck*", when I lifted the birdhouse and food started coming out.

"Why is there what?" Spouse looked outside the door. "Dog food? Oh, I thought you said dog poo!"

I poured the rest of the kibble out of the back of the birdhouse. Scratch grains came tumbling after the kibble, and then a small, abandoned mud-dauber's nest. "I bet there's a bird hiding away this food," says Spouse. "Can you imagine how long it took to load all this?" There were at least three cups of kibble stored inside.

"We should set up a web cam, see who's doing this work", he says. Shouldn't be too hard to do, as there's already two web cams up: one monitoring the night pen, and one looking out over the front yard. Between the cams, the dogs, the geese, and the electrified poultry netting, we have the best protected pasture-raised, free-ranging chickens in the county. Now it looks like the local wildlife is taking advantage of that protection (and the feed) as well...

*phrase courtesy of Natalie, who has a chicken and a wonderful geekly family, and writes about them over at Chicken Blog.

[pic: stored food & birdhouse. Birdhouse was made by Spouse's dad - gorgeous!]