As she waddled toward me, I knew that something was very wrong. I’d just gotten home from a one-week trip to Maui and she greeted me with cool nose and an unusual shyly wagging tail. That spoke volumes as it traditionally pounds enthusiastically against the cabinets. Yup, she’d done something and it was my job to discover exactly what!

Suzi appeared to have gained weight (perhaps 5 lbs.) over a very short period of time. The man of the house swore that he’d only given her “the usual” food and supplements. So, knowing that she thinks that she is starving, literally, all the time, I suspected that she’d discovered an alternate food source!

My suspicions were confirmed when I took her outside to “do her business.” Upon seeing the specimen that she deposited, one of two things were made clear. Either Suzi had developed a plethora of unusually shaped parasites or she’d been eating birdseed from beneath the feeder! This had been done in spite of the little snap-together fence that we’ve had around it for a few months. She’d clearly grazed on seed for days!

It was obvious that Suz had valued volume over taste as the seeds were undamaged — leaving peanuts easy to identify! So, her size was less the result of weight gain and more the result of BLOATING! She was about to explode!

Wrong. She had already exploded…in my office area! It took me a while to discover the…shrapnel but even longer to repair the damage. Each of the no-less-than eight piles were brimming with seed!

Now, I knew that I couldn’t change the “quality” of my hubby’s “watching the girls” because retraining (at his age) is all but impossible. So, we now have a new, one-piece circular fence around the bird feeder area. Suzi will have to either dig…or fly in order to get to her recently discovered food source.