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Nail mystery - not nailed
I now wish Bruce and I had thought to save the first few rusty nails we found along our front porch steps and walkway. By now we’d have about 10, instead of the three in a small white bowl.
It’s been about a week since Bruce discovered a trio of rusty nails a few feet from our front door.
“Weird,” he said, as he tossed them in the trash. After that he wandered all over our front yard and driveway area in search of other rusty nails, just in case he’d missed some that would cause a flat tire.
The next day I found two more nails, exactly in the same places Bruce had looked the previous day. Like Bruce, I looked hard to find other nails, but found none.
The following day I found one in plain sight on the bottom step.
The nails all had that deliberately placed look of a dead-mouse offering delivered to the doorstep.
But what animal delivers rusty nails? And where were these odd-sized nails coming from? We have no nails like that around our property.
I could kick myself now for throwing all those nails away. How were we to know there’d be more?
I fished the last nail out of the garbage can and put it in a small bowl. Since then, my nail collection has grown to four.
These nails intrigue us.
It’s been more than two years since we finished building our house, but even so, any construction mess is long, long gone.
Did some ne’er-do-well throw the nails the 70 feet or so from the main road to our entryway? Not likely. Nails are lightweight. And if propelled by someone who could throw nails that far, you’d think the nails would be widely scattered instead of landing in the same approximate location.
Did an animal bring us the nails as gifts, much as a proud cat will deliver dead mice to its master’s doorstep? If so, what kind of animal would do that? And why? These aren’t shiny, new nails. These look fragile and ancient, like they were uncovered from an old dig.
We’re stumped, but trying to keep an open mind.
The nails reminds us of last summer’s unsolved cedar-plank salmon mystery. One minute a full salmon fillet was baking nicely on its cedar plank inside our closed, hot barbecue.
The next minute it was gone. When Bruce lifted the barbecue lid he found a vacant cedar plank. No fish.
We found it lying on the ground behind the grill, completely intact and perfectly baked.
But I was talking about our mysterious rusty nails.
And everyone knows that rusty nails and cedar-planked salmon have nothing in common.
Except at our house.
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Hmmmmm..
Doni, We had the same thing only with dimes. Lucky for us. This has happened many different times totalling to over $2.00. That’s a lot of dimes.
One morning as I was getting into my car I found a dime right on the dash, “now how did a dime get there” I thought. Or another time while starting dinner I found a dime in one of my pots just out of the cabinet. Strange!! All of the dimes were heads up. Whew, at least that was a lucky sign. Now I’ve heard of pennies from heaven but dimes!
Raccoons?
OK, time to install outdoor cameras. You and Bruce have the know how to do this. You can buy them reasonably. Put one up for the workshop, front of the house and back deck. You can monitor the sites from your computer. Motion sensor lights are a good idea, as well. Critters of all types don’t like those bright lights coming on when lurking about.
It could be a crow. They love to leave little treats. A crow “befriended” my dad years ago in So. CA and was always leaving little treasures for him.
Good luck figuring out the mystery about the rusty nails. But as to motion lights keeping critters away, I beg to differ. We have a small pond by our hot tub. It is not deep, so keeping fish away from raccoons’ paws was a problem. We tried putting rocks in the bottom so the fish could hide, but the coons just moved the rocks. So we put in a motion sensor light. The coons came, the lights came on, the coons said to themselves, “Great! Now we can really see our dinner! Thanks for the help!” Except mosquito fish, we gave up on putting fish in our small pond. We still enjoy it anyway - just no koi.
Just an old miner and his haunt…a nail most often received a blow with a hammer instilling in it energy creating a link between now and then. Ha! Maybe one of your critters has an iron deficiency..? Better get those webcams installed…this could be big if the fires haven’t run them off. Hope all is well!
That is so strange!!! The salmon story is also very strange. The Igo ghost perhaps?
Sounds like the desert rat in Celeste’s wonderful book, The Last Good Fairy!
Doni, my husband and I have taken a metal detector out in our “back yard” (BLM) and found square nails (from olden days), Chinese coins, very early barbed wire, lead shot, etc. It’s amazing what is around us that we can’t see. I think your wonderful mystery involves some feathered or furred critter. Where is Hercule Perot when we need him?
It could be a pack rat. They love to collect things and often trade — take something and leave something. Their nests include a very strange assortment of things. One got in our cabin one winter and collected dead mice bodies and put them all in a wash basin.
Nice . . .
I have it all figured out. The birds have given up on you putting up a bird feeder or bird house on your own. They are out collecting nails and eventually hope that you will have enough to build a bird house/bird feeder.
Next thing to find-the wood. Might be fun to watch how they transport that!