Something stinky...

Well. That's over and done with.
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For a few days now, when I went out my front door, or opened my living room window, this sickly sweet nasty odor came wafting in. I figured something must have crawled either under the front cement step, or under the bushes somewhere and kicked the bucket, so to speak.
I looked briefly, but couldn't detect exactly where the smell was emanating from. All I know is, when I got too close to ground level, it was bad. Real bad.
With only a 2 inch opening behind the cement step, odds were that if anything crawled in there, it had to be a small rodent. In which case, I wouldn't be able to access it, and would have to live with it it until it completely decomposed. Ugh.
Today, upon opening the front window to try to cool off the house, I decided I'd had enough. I would play detective and come to the bottom of this if I could.
Armed with a weak flashlight and some garden gloves, I began pulling back branches from the very large (way too large, if you ask me) evergreen to see down to the bottom. This baby is about 6 feet across and 2 - 2 1/2 feet tall. One of those ugly evergreens everyone planted 20 years ago too close to the house, and now it needs to be cut out completely.
Anyway, I finally thought I detected something. So I got my garden rake, and began tentatively pulling out mulch from under this giant bush. I thought I saw a small flat mouse-like rodent.

Nope. Nothing came out with the rake but mulch.
I looked further in.
There it was. I pulled out a slightly flattened much dead squirrel. Apparently something happened to it (West Nile? Lost a fight with a hawk? Too big of leap off the deck?...) and it crawled, thank you very much, under my bush to die. (Why not the woods? There are ACRES of woods around my house!)
Well, it finally got a decent burial. I couldn't bury it too deep, as there were too many tree roots. I just hope the coyotes don't come this close to the house...

PS: As much as I love to include photos in my blog ---I think I will forgo it this time. :0)