Hello, thanks for your help!

I live on the fourth floor of an apartment building and have a balcony. I planted four planters with bulbs three days ago. I woke up this morning to two planters looking as they did when I planted them, and the other two are mysteriously messy, one even has holes in the soil. We had pretty bad weather overnight, so my first thought was an animal came up for shelter, but I may be way off with my guess. I have two questions:

1) Who/what is doing this?
2) Should I be taking preventative action? Or can I just put more dirt back into the pot and hope it doesn't happen again? One of the holes exposed a bulb, but it doesn't look like any were taken.

Thank you!

I've had the same thing happen. I'm guessing it was birds or chipmunks. They will often dig in planters and uproot plants or bulbs. You could drape some bird netting over them.

Probably squirrels. Some chicken wire across the top of the soil should stop them. You could feed them dried corn on the cob to distract them, if you don't mind them being around, although they might dig anyway. They dig to hide or find caches of nuts or other food. However, they can seem a bit compulsive about it, so I think they just enjoy it.

It looks to me like the soil was washed out. What's above you? Leaky rain gutter? Weird upstairs neighbor throwing out the dish water?

I agree with Daisy. Look at the splash back on the railing boards. You must have had some rain storm going on.

Thanks everyone for your help! Went to the store last night and purchased some bird netting. So far, so good. We did have some rough storms the night it happened, so I think a lot of the splash back can be attributed to that, too. Thanks again!

Can't wait to see the bulbs come up and bloom for you.