I suspect there are no mice anywhere on my street

[marydell]

Taking Charlie for a walk, I stopped two doors down at the Y's house to look at (but not touch) the latest litter of semi-feral kittens.  There seem to be about 6 of them hanging out in a basket on the Y's porch and playing in the yard, with 3 adult cats looking after them.  The cats normally live in the garage and have a small opening to come and go as they like, including wandering through my yard and everyone else's who doesn't have a dog or their own territorial outdoor cat.

A few doors further on, we stopped to talk to another neighbor for a while, one with a bird feeder hanging in a tall pine tree and a lot of sparrow-type birds apparently living further up the tree. A large commotion started among the birds in the tree, and I look up to see a frickin HAWK flying toward us, being chased by screaming gulls who usually hang out in the BK parking lot a little ways past my house in the other direction (I live on the scenic end of the street).  The hawk lands in the other tall tree next to the pine tree and just hangs out.  The neighbor explains that the smaller birds will try to attack the hawk to drive it away from their nests, and that's why the gulls were chasing it and the sparrows were hollering.  Good luck with that, birdies.  As we headed back home we saw that all the kittens had retreated to their porch, and one of the mom cats was sitting in front of them giving me the side eye. 

I love the suburbs...just enough nature to be interesting, but not so much as to require me to deal with stuff like having a raccoon in my bedroom wall (I grew up next to a wooded riverbank).

Comments

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

Amusingly enough, this was right below another note from a friend of mine with a toddler named Charlie. At first I thought both posts were about the same Charlie. :D

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I don't know about the "in my bedroom wall" part, but here in inner-city Minneapolis we have raccoons raiding trash cans. I've also seen woodchucks (or something like that--I'm not much of a naturalist) and wild turkeys in this neighborhood. I'm not sure how far into the city limits deer have come, or whether coyotes have made it that far at all, but the deer are a big problem in the near suburbs, and there are coyotes there, and the DNR killed a black bear in North St. Paul.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

My bedroom was in the attic (as befits the youngest of a v. big family), next to an unfinished storeroom. Add in elderly wooden soffits and hilarity ensues.

We don't have any coyotes or bears here yet, as far as I know, although apparently there was a cougar within the city limits not long ago. By me there are raccoons and squirrels and bunnies, although not so much lately as the cat population has grown. No deer in my suburb but they have them all over the forest preserves that are a couple of suburbs away.

I am glad that we don't seem to have opossums on my street, because they have those nasty tails and beady eyes. We had a lot of them where I grew up, always getting into the trash.