Blog Prompt: DO YOU EVER SEE WILD ANIMALS?

The beautiful young couple who purchased the other half of our semi-detached, have set up a hot tub on the back deck, practically under my bedroom window.  They have two other beautiful-couple pairs of friends who came over every weekend, and shared the tub.  So far it’s all just been string bikinis and playful splashing, but I’m keeping an eye on them in case it goes to full nudity and drunken pool sex.
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The blogger who I lifted this prompt from, said that “he lived in the city, and he never saw any wild animals.’  I don’t know what he thinks (or doesn’t think) ‘Wild Animals’ are, but even downtown, rats, and seagulls and crows fit the definition.  Every little park and green space would have squirrels/chipmunks.

I live out in the ‘Burbs,’ and, aside from the new neighbors, there is no shortage of wild animals.  I had a rather startling, nose-to-nose meeting with a possum a couple of years back.  A female skunk lives under my concrete front porch.  She’s raised a couple of broods of babies.  I’ve heard them, but never seen them.  I’ve learned to turn on the porch light, if I have to go out in the dark.  The wife put a pottery ‘toad-house’ in the front garden, and a toad lives under it.

A relatively new road was cut through the woods behind a golf course.  Several times I’ve seen red foxes quickly crossing the street.  I don’t drive at night much anymore, but a couple of times, a ‘cat’ crossing the road, has turned out to be a racoon, when I get closer.

Besides the gulls and crows, there are birds aplenty – robins, sparrows, chickadees, juncos, blue jays and cardinals.  Ravens and turkey buzzards circle the skies, waiting to clean up the road-kill, especially out near the land-fill.  Occasionally, even a great blue heron serenely floats across my sky.

The daughter’s housing complex abuts a creek that flows into the small lake in the downtown park.  A red-tailed hawk regularly roosts in a tall pine tree behind her house.  There are also noisy blue jays and cardinals, though not when the hawk is around.  A clan each, of ducks and Canada geese, paddle up and down the creek.

Apparently none of them like to swim through the culvert which carries the creek under her street.  It’s a good thing that she lives on a block-long dead-end, and traffic is sparse and slow-moving.  It is common to have to slam on the brakes as a line of them ascend the bank, arrogantly march across the road, and even through her parking area.  It’s even cuter in the spring, when broods of ducklings and goslings stretch out the line of the parade.  They sometimes eat frogs and crawdads which live in the creek.

Meanwhile, over at the lake in the park….  I don’t know whether they qualify as ‘wildlife,’ but the city purchased and installed a pair of swans.  Swans ‘usually’ mate for life.  The female died.  25 miles away, in Stratford, Ontario, a male swan died.  City works crews purchased the female, drove her over, and introduced Ophelia, to our German ‘Otto.’  After two years, it seems a happy and successful second marriage for them both.