Civet

I check for bamboo shoots for 20 minutes or so every other day, but so far there are only 2-3 each time. Either someone is taking care of them when no one is around, or this year the roots are weaker or something. Maybe the messed up weather has confused the season for the bamboo too so they all pop up later. Who knows. At least right now they are not there yet.
In the garden, I cleaned up a row in the backyard and planted whatever seeds I had left of eggplants and paprika and string beans. And in the main garden beds, where there are no saplings, I put corn.
The plum tree which I have been spraying like crazy with neem oil has now lots of tiny fruits, but unfortunately the plum pocket disease has not vanished. However, the affected fruits seem less than last year. Could it be that the neem oil is helping? If by the time summer comes the tree only gives a handful of fruit again, and the rest turn into zombies, then I will just cut it down and plant something more resistant.
This morning early I went like usual with feed to the chicken run. After feeding the birds, on my way back to the house I decided to walk past the tiny pear sapling to see if it has decided to grow a tiny branch yet.
Then I heard a bark/hiss from the civet trap, which I had completely not noticed on my way up to the chicken run. The trap has been lying there for ages now, with 1 single egg in it which I figured had rotten. It was there all winter and I had learned to walk around it and just ignore the whole cage. So imagine how my heart jumped three meters when I heard the sudden bark of a civet for the first time in my life. Apparently the civet thought I got a bit too close on my way back and wanted to scare me or something.
It had rained heavily all night last night, as well as strong winds so I wonder what made it come out and look for food in such a night. It was a very scared and exhausted thing, and I gave it a banana to eat before thinking how to deal with it. It wolfed the banana down and continued to hiss angrily at me. It was in pretty bad shape, it had scratch wounds and missing patches of fur which I don't think were from the cage.

The culprit

Maybe it had little baby civets waiting for food back home, maybe it wasn't the same civet as the one who tried to eat my chickens last year and the one who took one chick the year before that. All I know is it was in the garden despite the fencing and digging in my crops and eating whatever little I was planting. It was just being a civet doing what civets do to live. Of course, civets are not native to Japan and were introduced from other countries so it should have been doing civet stuff somewhere else.