A great "small Saturday" to all, as we call Wednesdays small Saturdays over here. We could never understand what kind of birds pluck and eat the Pincushion flowers until today.
Here is the culprit.
Nature really knows how to make clowns out of all of us, as I could never figure out what kind of big bird it was that could pluck a big pincushion flower and then eat it. I knew that the ducks, the geese or the peacocks wouldn't eat pincushions, as they were all too heavy to sit up high on a big pincushion bush.
And yet here is a picture below that I took a week ago, that according to me, some big bird plucked and ate on the grass.
But it never was a bird now was it? Watch this squirrel in action.
I moved closer, so he grabbed the flower and slid his way down inside the bush.
And then he skedaddled.
But I am an old hand at ghosting up to little buggers, and the show goes on.
Can it be true? The thought raced through my mind. There was no big bird that ate the pincushions, as this squirrel was the culprit.
Slowly I moved closer to him.
But I got too close, and he decided that he had enough.
That tree was his escape route, and he went up into it as fast as the rockets that the new owner of X sends into space :)
Amazing isn't it. Even more amazing is that squirrels are also pollinators. The seeds of the flowers that they drop will naturally become embedded in the soil and then new pincushion bushes will grow. Squirrels are also gardeners, as they bury nuts, as food for the winter periods and then they forget where they buried the nuts. We had firsthand experience of this, as we used to feed them peanuts in the garden of our previous home, and every spring season, new peanut bushes would pop up all over the show. Of course, we also had quarrels with the neighbors, because peanut bushes would also start to grow in their flower beds. Not only that, but the squirrels also planted avocado tree pips, and imagine an avocado tree popping up in a neighbor's prized rose bed garden :)
But such is life, and I was glad to discover what it is that eats the pincushion flowers. Strangely, they don't eat the red pincushion flowers, only the yellow ones.
I hope that you liked the pictures and the story.
Photos by Zac Smith-All Rights Reserved.
Camera: Canon Powershot SX70HS Bridge camera.
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