I live on four-and-a-half acres right outside of San Antonio. Used to be ‘out in the sticks’, but the city has moved out to us and it’s getting more like the suburbs everyday. Most people out here subdivided their lots, sold them off, cleared the brush and small trees, and now they have duplicated a city lot where a nice piece of ‘country’ used to be. They put up tall fences to keep the deer out and freak out if they find some critter in their yard.
The front half of my property is decently cleared of brush, and the grass mowed, but all the couple hundred trees were left in place. The back half has not been touched since 1965. If you look at a Google aerial view of my lot, it is a green rectangle nestled in a larger grid of dirt brown semi-bare homesteads.
Consequently, my ‘yard’ is a little refuge for the local wildlife. Since my main neighbors and I don’t have dogs, we have let the fences fall down in several areas, but we don’t mind because it makes it easier for the baby deer to follow momma deer lot-to-lot. I watched a momma deer give brth in my front yard last spring, right from my kitchen window.
I have lots of squirrels, an occasional skunk (smell 'em more than see’em), possum, rabbit, raccoon, red fox, and bunches of deer. Not unusual to have eight to ten deer laying out in the front yard, in the shade of the trees, taking a high noon break.
I have lots of birds, but I couldn’t tell you what they all are. Quite a few cardinal pairs, occasionally a road runner, lots of hawks screeching from the sky, some big buzzards when there is something dead to feast upon, and rarely a large owl that will scare the hell out of you when it takes off out of a tree just as you walk underneath it.
Though I haven’t seen any in all these years, I have seen a squshed porcupine off the side of the road. Surprisingly, I have seen few snakes in all these years - three or four coral snakes, no rattlers, and a few huge rat snakes that will give you a fright when you find one when you open your garage door. Between the snakes and hawks, I haven’t seen any mice or rats to speak of. I think that is also why the rabbit population isn’t what it used to be.
Sadly, no more armadillos. They disappeared when the fire ants came to town, and I haven’t seen one in about twenty years. Haven’t seen a ‘horned toad’ even longer.
One neighbor has a mated pair of pet turkeys that wander about his place. They are very sociable, and if I go out in the yard and work on my car, they will often see me and jump the fence and come over and sit down just a few feet behind me and watch me work. We both enjoy the company.
I love my little mobile menagerie, and don’t quite understand the frame of mind that so many people have out here and their aversion to the natural wildlife that begrudgingly share their habitat with us.
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The neighbor’s yard gets rabbits. There was a possum living under the other neighbor’s porch, attracted by the cat food we put out for the outside cats, but the neighbor found out about it, and it’s gone. The cats brought home a mole once, but there are no mole hills in the yard.