Backyard wildlife

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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My son is constantly looking for wildlife in our yard and neighborhood.

In the yard, we always have squirrels, toads, geckos, anoles, Texas blind snakes (they look like earthworms, but stick their little forked tongues out), possums, mourning doves, grackles, blue jays, cardinals, sparrows and possums.

We frequently see raccoons, armadillos, red-tailed hawks, buzzards, rat snakes, rabbits, red-eared slider turtles, crawdads, assorted water snakes (only a few of whom are cottonmouths), frogs, Texas brown snakes (little guys who THINK they’re big guys!), woodpeckers, flycatchers, crows and white tail deer.

Once in a blue moon, we’ll see foxes, roadrunners, skunks and snapping turtles.

We HEAR coyotes all the time, but have never actually seen any.

My son has a very sharp eye for spotting wildlife. He loves pointing out hawks that are sitting on top of lampposts along the highways.

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We have sparrows, crows, seagulls, bluejays, cardinals, woodpeckers, starlings, grackles, wild turkeys, bunnies, gophers, and squirrels. In the past, we’ve had raccoons and coyotes.

The birds seem to work in shifts organized in such a way as to wake us up by different birds every morning. This morning it was the turkeys at 4:15. Yesterday, the woodpecker at 4:30. A few days ago, a murder of crows arguing at 5:00.

I used to love bird watching.

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We really enjoy our birdfeeders - we’ve become old people, I think. We get a ton of cardinals and house finches and blue jays and mockingbirds and doves, some chickadees, sometimes a cedar waxwing, sometimes a tufted titmouse. Carolina wrens, often. Occasionally we’ll get a red headed woodpecker, sometimes a different kind of woodpecker which we think is IIRC a red bellied one? Suddenly we have a starling, which I am not very fond of as it seems to run other birds off.

The squirrels are very acrobatic with the feeder. I don’t really mind them eating from it because they’re so much fun to watch get in there.

We can hear yellow bellied sapsuckers and a variety of owls, but we don’t actually see them. We do see hawks, up above usually. Occasionally a little closer. Once I saw one catching a rabbit in the yard, maybe ten feet away from me - wow, that’s a big bird! A turkey vulture sat on a telephone pole staring at a friend of mine a few blocks away for a couple days. That’s a REALLY big bird.

As for mammals other than the squirrels, we see some possums, occasionally a raccoon.

Down at the canal where I ran before I became Great With Child we’d also see otters and beavers. There’s always at least one Great Blue Heron, often more than one. A few egrets. Once an anhinga, once a kingbird. Turtles, sometimes. Ducks. It’s nice.

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Take a 20 minute drive from DC to western Fairfax county and you will see a lot of foxes. Red foxes, and they are gorgeous with big bushy tails and they aren’t all that spooked by people either.

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The most unusual “wildlife” I’ve seen in my current apartment complex was a land planarian.

When I lived in San Diego, the complex was right on the edge of a canyon–it was fairly common to see skunks, racoons, opossums, coyotes, tree frogs, slender salamanders, snakes, alligator lizards, owls, red tails and even the occasional road runner.

46

I’m doing exactly that to those rats with cute faces and furry tails. Despite a lack of direct trees or foilage leading up to my deck, which is at least 16’ or more off the ground as I’m located on a downward slope, those little bastards shimmy up my 6x6 deck support posts to wreak havoc on my garden, which is deck-based to begin with because of the damn deer!

:mad:

OK, I’m not really MAD about it, but I have been plinking them with pellets and the war has been going in my favor so far. They seem to understand that when they hear the <<snick>> of the deck door opening that it’s time to run back from the woods behind the house from whence they came and where they should remain for their daily forage.

Otherwise, it’s bedtime for bonzo.

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How about one of these. Chestnut-backed chickadee or Black-capped chickadee.