Tonight’s NOT was inspired by @Loveshaq post on Twiggy the squirrel. What kind of wildlife shows up on your back door? Not much is happening around us right now with it being winter on the east coast. The rest of the year will be full of sights and sounds. We get the usual assorted birds, rabbits, skunks, squirrels, and the occasional opossum. The last two years we have had a fox roaming around. The neighborhood watch sends out alerts on social media when it comes around. Last summer we had a bear show up – We live in the city. Oh, We also had a naked jogger this past autumn.
no wildlife in my garden
the cats take care of all the small stuff…and there is no big stuff here
deer and boar dont wander into the city….even a little one like mine
i do have a chihuaha song tho
Aside from nonstop birds, my daily squirrel visitor, and raccoons passing through at night, our other visitors are less common. We get occasional deer & more frequently coyotes. My beer buddy set up a mouse zapper under his porch & put a camera under there too. He captured a weasel going & taking all the dead mice out of the zapper. So now he has a weasel feeder! I’ve never seen a weasel in the wild.
I forgot rabbits as I look out & see one eating my lawn.
I live in a decent sized city but twice in the past year we’ve had deer on our street. We get foxes regularly and they are always show stoppers — crazy beautiful. But their cries range from weird to bone chilling. When we have the windows open at night it’s not uncommon to get woken up by their screams, but our dog has learned how to sleep through them.
I’ve posted photos of the herons which show up in the stream behind our alley, and we are lucky to get barred owls pretty regularly. It’s easier to hear them than see them, but from time to time they make a show.
No naked joggers, though.
Oh, and snakes. Little tiny baby Garter Snakes no bigger than an earthworm, and Black Snakes more like four or five feet long.
One time my dog was in the back yard happily chewing away on what I thought was a stick. Then I took a closer look and realized it was the dried up corpse of a Black Snake, skin and bones still partially attached. I made her give it up.
Birbs, borbs, squirrels, chippies, and the occasional opossum. The last one based on spotting scat in the yard, I haven’t seen them directly.
As for my back door, my neighbor’s dog Trixie who was the size of a small bear used to show up at my back slider. She was besties w/ my dog but when I let her in she would go in our basement & lay on the cool tile floor in the bathroom. She passed away, I miss that crazy dog. She used to eat bees & taught my dog to do it too. Spicy!
The usual stuff, squirrels, chipmunks, groundhogs, bunnies, and possums. Crows, hawks, lots of vultures, and the past couple of years Mississippi Kites. There are foxes and coyotes about but I’ve never seen any in our yard.
I’d never heard of Mississippi Kites before, but I just looked those up and those are absolutely gorgeous birds.
They are beautiful, and it’s still a bit of a novelty to see them fly over the yard because they only started nesting in the area in the last few years.
Crows, Canadian geese (the only unapologetic Canadians that I know of. I loath those filthy bags of shit), squirrels, rabbits, rats, bald eagles, hawks, bats, owls, blue herons, an occasional king fisher and osprey, and one coyote (who may be a suburban legend).
I’ll see your naked jogger and raise you two men fucking under a blackberry bush by the lake.
A lot of blackberry brambles have thorns. That sounds like an ouchie situation.
@HammerZeitgeist
I’ll see your two men fucking and raise you a woman (not Ellie) chasing her boyfriend around with a machete in my and my neighbor’s front yard.
I fold.
Our dearly departed Violet used to lurk around in the bushes.
We have pretty much what everyone else has including hydrangea eating deer and coyotes I’ve had to chase out for our yard. We are right next to a state park but the park is very busy with humans so the wildlife is pretty shy. One of our dogs goes crazy when he hears the Barred Owls – no matter what time of night – which is weird because he doesn’t react to anything else. We had a fox once – that was an incredibly beautiful creature – it looked at me like it wanted to tell me some things.
I’ve been rewilding our yard – getting rid of grass, growing native plants and not tidying up much. It’s hard to make it a wildlife area though because our neighbors have about 12 outdoor cats and they kill everything. They’ve killed all of the chipmunks that lived in the stone wall and the Brown Thrasher couple that was always in the side yard. We don’t have any Robins anymore, but the Blue Jays are too mean to kill. The only good thing about it is that I’m getting to be a really good aim with the super-soaker.
@Lymond
We had neighbors that had outdoor cats. They would go after the mourning doves and rabbits. And those shits would tear apart my garbage. When they moved we saw an increase in the bunnies. Also we have a catch, spay, and release program for feral cats in our county. There is a lot of farmland surrounding the city.
@KeitelBlacksmith
I hear ya – me and another neighbor are our catch/fix/release team for our street. She catches them and takes them – I pay. Most of them belong to one neighbor who kept letting them multiply. Some of them sleep on our front porch which is cute but then they also poop in our flower beds and I don’t want anyone to get toxoplasmosis – that would not be cute.
Being deep in suburbia, I only see rabbits, raccoons, squirrels and the odd fox.
Since I don’t do much with my back lawn except cutting, it has become an animal bus station with animals passing through daily.
My parents though have a much more interesting collection of animals and birds in their backyard.
Wild Turkey, deer, coyotes, geese, foxes and grouse.
Mostly birds, squirrels, and rabbits, though the latter are hibernating (?) for the winter. I’ve also seen hawks, field mice, and bats circling at sunset.
Topical to this post, this morning I was drinking my tea and watching the bird feeders and noticed that there is going to be one less dove in the yard based on the feather splatter pattern. Seeing as when I looked out the other windows I spotted a hawk circling around, I’m guessing they had a nice snack.