Animal Encounters of Another Kind

I thought I would take a video of the garden borders and bed above the rocky ledge (now a meadow after backfilling and reseeding by the developer).  The poppies mark the south corner of the deck above and the patio below and make a good landmark for getting your bearings about the layout of the garden in relation to the ledge and hillside to the east behind us. I'm not sure what the sounds are beyond the birdsong...

At the corner where the borders meet the larger bed, the poppies are growing under the bird house.

When looking closely at the photo, I noticed a feather sticking out of the the birdhouse (lower right).

I had seen some sparrows, female and male, with three youngsters learning to fly on the ledge in the morning when I was photographing the wildflowers.  I thought they might be the family from our birdhouse.  All was quiet during the afternoon.  No sighting of the parents with insects in their mouths at the birdhouse opening. And that feather seemed ominous. It was definitely not a sparrow feather.

But Larry claimed he heard babies in the birdhouse after dinner--and got it on his phone to prove that all was well.  Well, the video is sideways-- but the babies are hungry and still in the birdhouse.

So, the bird feather was not an omen that the sparrows were gone --but the long grey feather is now mysteriously gone...

The other animal encounter was ominous.  We saw another snapping turtle this morning burrowing into a mulched landscape bed.  She was muddy and half buried when we saw her. By the time we left, she was completely submerged under the mulch. Can you imagine planting some annuals around the bushes in the landscape bed and, suddenly, a snapping turtle's head emerges to attack you?  Not even the landscaped beds are safe now!  And those snappers are positively prehistoric!