A reasonable explanation

I know this is going to sound weird but if anyone can help explain where they went, this group will!

I shot two red squirrels off of my bird feeder Saturday late afternoon. I got busy doing other things and forgot to take care of them Saturday evening. So I was up early Sunday morning and went out to take care of them. They were gone! All but one of the tails. The only tracks that I could see are deer tracks in the fresh snow. No sign of anything left but the tail, no blood, hair, NOTHING! Both of these squirrels were at the base of the tree and defiantly dead! Where did they go? Did (would) a deer eat them? The guys I work with think I am nuts!!! But if not the deer, what? Owl.... Maybe? Fox, cat, coyote...... more likely but where are the tracks and those animals would have grabbed it and left including the tail.

Side note, same thing happened last weekend with one dead red squirrel but no snow to place blame.

I guess the question is, do you think that a whitetail deer would eat a dead red squirrel???

Next red squirrel I shoot, will have a camera watching!!!!!

Strut

I would think owl or some other bird of prey. I have set dead pack rats out and watched an owl come and take them.

The local great horned owl community is very thankful for the midwinter meal that you provided for them.

I would think an owl, hawk or some sort of flying carnivore probably had a good meal thanks to your actions.

Sasquatch here.......but you are too far north

bill

Tall Timbers Plantation in Florida has video of a deer eating quail eggs.

Owl.

TreeDaddy said:

Sasquatch here.......but you are too far north

bill

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Bill, you know dang well ain’t no ‘sqatches in East Texas. They’re bigfoots !

Bigfeets.

I was squirrel hunting once when a red tailed hawk swooped down and grabbed a squirrel I had shot. I was shooting them and letting them lay before I would get up and retrieve them. As soon as it swooped down, I ran over to it and the hawk flew off without my squirrel. It beat the ground with it's wings pretty good though, so I think in snow there would have been some type of brush strokes or something from the wings.

My pop's cat only leaves the tails. He's a squirrel killing machine. Had to take an Xray of him once. Bones from stomach to anus. Pop feeds him an 1/8 of a cup of food a day and he's still a little fat. Like most of us, that cat shops at a different grocery store. He's just better at it than I am.

Okvet03 said:

My pop's cat only leaves the tails. He's a squirrel killing machine. Had to take an Xray of him once. Bones from stomach to anus. Pop feeds him an 1/8 of a cup of food a day and he's still a little fat. Like most of us, that cat shops at a different grocery store. He's just better at it than I am.

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Speaking of cats eating anything, we had a cat that passed a 6/0 mustad hook with no lasting ill effects, after it getting stuck at the very end. I noticed that the cat was trailing 6 inches of fishing line with a loop on the end, out of it's rear end, several days after eating bluefish heads, so I turned it out with a pliers while my wife held the cat with leather gloves. The cat gave an earsplitting yowl and it was out. As the Brits would say, a rather nasty job, but I've had a few of those. I gave the wife a choice of jobs, and why do you think she picked to do the holding part? (Then we changed the cats name to fishhook)

Nice work! Hope you washed that hook.