October 6, 2016

  • Looking at Night Shadows

    Sparky and I were coming home after dark the other day. As we turned on to our street we both spotted an owl statue that the hippy neighbors had put in their front yard near the street. My first thought was that they had put it out for trash pickup. My second thought was that it would make a really cool geocaching container. We drove the block to our house. Sparky had to run out to get some bolt cutters from his brother in law and mentioned that he would get a better look at the owl statue and see if it was being discarded. Less than a minute later my phone rang and an excited Sparky was gasping that it wasn't a statue! It was a real owl!! Now I was as shocked and excited as Sparky. This was not a little barn owl. The "statue" we saw was a good 18 inches tall or maybe taller and substantial. As my husband approached the spot he realized that the branch the owl had been perched on was not a branch but the freshly killed body of a rather large rabbit. He pulled around the corner and sat waiting to see if the owl would return. He waited but no sign of the owl. On his return home with the bolt cutters he stopped again to see if the rabbit was still there. The rabbit was gone - mostly. All that remained on the neighbor's lawn was the entrails. The owl was so quiet when it flew away that it was hard to tell if there had really been an owl or maybe it was just a shadow in the night.

    Rabbit

    We have been overrun by all critters great and small in the last couple of weeks. There have been the usual squirrels and chipmunks galore. But we have also seen opossums, groundhogs, raccoons, and the rapidly multiplying rabbits. Then there are the deer. My neighbor had a doe and her 3 fawns in her front yard! It is crazy. I nearly hit a deer that was leisurely meandering down the middle of the street in the neighborhood. I'm just glad I have good brakes!

    Doe and fawns

Comments (14)

  • Not very often you see an owl. They also get chickens and ducks but I know they get a lot of pests too. Deer are really survivors, aren't they? They look beautiful.

    • The deer in our neighborhood are becoming pests. They have been eating all the flowers and nibbling on people's shrubs. I imagine come winter they will be worse than last year when they stripped the bark off some of the trees - killed quite a few trees... Their population has ballooned!

  • Poor bunny! We haven't seen an increase in animals here. One year I hit 2 deer with my car. A young man was staying with us, working on our house (the old one) and he gutted both of them for us then we had them tagged and took them to be processed. I gave the meat from one of them to take home to his family. We kept the other meat. It was good. The car wasn't badly damaged. I felt bad about it though.

    • I would feel bad too but I'd really enjoy the venison! At least you had something in return for the car damage. Too often the deer are hit but manage to run away and the motorist has a smashed up car and no deer... still if it totals the car it becomes very expensive meat!

  • I like deer. I think they are pretty, but we have to be careful driving certain roads at dusk or after dark because they feed there. Once, just like Rory Gillmore, I got hit by a deer when my car was at a stop.

    • hehe! I haven't heard anyone mention the Gilmore Girls in a long time! It is going to get crazy with the deer since the youth hunting was last week and now it is bow season with rifle season to follow soon. The deer will be running through the neighborhood and dashing across roads!!

  • Interesting....we see deer often too in the neighborhoods around here...and bunnies too.

    • The deer populations have exploded. We have herds of them walking down the middle of the streets. Come firearm season for deer they will be running through the neighborhood in a panic from the hunters...

  • Blessed are you to have those wild animals in your backyard or at the neighbor's , including a phantasmagoric owl!
    Love <3
    Michel

  • So many deer that they are in your streets! Wow ~

    • They are all over the place. I guess they know that there are no hunters in the neighborhood and that shooting a gun in the city limits is against the law... thus there are herds of them just lollygagging about. Last night we were coming back from Sparky's parent's house (just down the street and around the corner) when we spotted a deer leisurely grazing in the grass next to the tennis courts. She looked at us and then went back to eating.

  • When I first moved here 25 years ago, we had an occasional deer encounter -- I haven't seen one here for at least 20 years now! We do have animals -- bobcats on the trails, and occasionally a coyote in the housing tracts. The coyotes are becoming very bold, and they are dangerous to small and other people!

    • We have had a few coyote sightings in the area. Thankfully they are very shy and pretty much stay away from people and houses. A friend lives out in the country and she hears them howling during the summer but has only seen one once.

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