Adding to the insult from the daily marauders (grackles, cowbirds, etc.) are the night time ones.  It is apparently the week for skunks, raccoons and oppossums to awaken and stake out a claim, and they have been vying for a territory in our backyard, including nightly raids on our bird feeders.  It's getting ridiculous - we've never had this much trouble from them and I'm contemplating a complete halt of feeding for a few weeks to hope they move elsewhere.  One turf squabble on Tuesday night resulted in a blast from a skunk - I don't know who its ooponent was, but it stunk so bad that even the inside of our house wreaked!  An alternative is to bring in all the feeders at night and put them out in th emornoing, but this would be a lot of work due to the number of feeder stations.

Note on migration:

This morning when I dropped off our garbage at the Brown Station Road landfill (PG County) I saw a high string of birds in more or less a "V", but the wing beat and flight speed was odd for waterfowl.  To my surprise when I got bins on them it was about 200 Ring-billed Gulls, headed directly northeast.  Given that there were many 100s (if not 1000s) of gulls in the area due to the landfill, and many had begun to circle and soar but were not going anywhere, it was apparent that the RBGUs I saw flying past here in a high-altitude "V" were migrating.

Cheers-
Jeff Shenot
Croom MD