Backyard Wildlife

Sometimes the best place to experience nature is your own backyard. You don’t have to travel far and sometimes you see things you might miss if you were outside your familiar surroundings. Though we live on a crowded street with apartment buildings and businesses tucked in among the houses the woods that abut our property are full of wildlife and it is not uncommon for it to wander through our yard.

Last week while I sat at my computer in my upstairs office I looked out the window for a moment and spotted a deer feeding in our neighbor’s yard. The office window was a perfect vantage spot to watch the deer. It never looked up to see me and it couldn’t hear me through the window, though it was not far away. I went downstairs to get my binoculars and then called Maura to come see. Through the binoculars the deer seemed close enough to touch. We watched it, taking turns with the binoculars, for at least five minutes as it contentedly browsed shrubs at the edge of the woods.

Watching the deer was a special moment shared with my daughter but only one of the many encounters with wildlife we’ve had on our own small patch of land. When I used to come home late at night I often saw skunks or raccoons on our driveway when I pulled in. Once I spotted a fox travelling through. A red-tailed hawk hunts on our street. Maura and my mother once saw it take a pigeon off of our lawn. When I saw it dive on its prey its quarry escaped. One summer evening around sundown Jennifer saw a coyote pass through the yard. It came out from behind our honeysuckle bushes about fifteen feet away from her and was as surprised to see her as she was to see it. I’ve only heard the coyotes’ eerie howling in the woods on cold winter nights.

I’m sure there is much more that we haven’t seen. I’d never seen the deer until this year but I expected they were there and I know there are wild turkeys in the woods because I’ve seen them elsewhere around its bounds but never on our property. I look forward to many more wildlife sightings in our own yard in the years to come.