SIP Day 70, wearing a black short-sleeve tshirt and black gym shorts; 76 degrees outside; writing from my home office
The now-famous squirrel obstacle course video highlights how our relationships to our backyard wildlife has changed since we have spent two months at home. And while we haven’t manipulated any of our backyard wildlife like @MarkRober, or even made friends with them, we have become quite intrigued by the wide variety of creatures that we’ve discovered in our backyard.
We installed a “game camera” near the back part of our property when we began noticing animal poop appearing there nearly every morning, and what we found was that we have multiple regular nightly visitors. Most frequent is a possum who likes to hang out between 1-5am and eat bugs from the grass. While I have zero fondness of possums, I have massive respect for them as bug-eating machines. Around 4am it is common for us to have raccoons visit–we have caught them visiting solo and in pairs. And before midnight, a calico cat often visits and when he does, the first thing he likes to do is poop. I have no idea why our yard is her preferred litterbox, but I suspect it might have something to do with that cat showing dominance over our two housecats who we’ve caught staring at the roaming poop-cat through the back sliding glass door.
Perhaps the most fascinating part of our backyard fauna is of the avian variety. There are dozens of birds who visit everyday and who are especially enchanted by the bugs and worms that they find in our un-mown and gone-to-seed back lawn. In the late afternoon 2-4, we have crow feeding hour where we often have 12-15 crows gathered in a herd under the orange tree (they cooperatively open and eat the fallen oranges). Then, from about 5-8 pm each evening the yard is full of a variety of small birds, the most striking being a large number of neon-bright bluebirds.