Our Local Wildlife

One of the most appealing aspects of our townhouse when we decided to buy it was that it backs to the woods. We have a beautiful deck that is perfect for evening meals, afternoon reads, and checking out the local wildlife. We have had glimpses of deer though I've never been quick enough to grab my camera. We see birds a plenty - robins, doves, hawks, vultures (one which I scared and it flew off with a snake in its mouth...totally cool!), orioles, woodpeckers, and cardinals. There is one particular cardinal that loves to peck on our windows as he checks out his reflection.

We used to see rabbits all the time until we got our cats; Xander used to think it was the Easter Bunny and his siblings hopping around back there. For the past year the only rabbit that would venture into our yard was our neighbor's rabbit

but I took care of that by accidentally running over and killing him. That's a whole other story, though, that I still have a hard time talking about.
Of course it was out of the woods that we received our two cats, Princess and sweet Googie.


And every once in awhile we'll see turtles.


I love living so close to a big city like Baltimore and yet still see such wonderful wildlife. Unfortunately with the good also comes the bad. We get tons of spiders, the scariest being the humongous one I had a run-in with in our basement. This thing was so huge that at first I thought it was a fake one left over from our Halloween decorations and I couldn't figure out why it wasn't in the Halloween bin. I quickly found out how real it was! Xander and Noah watched me try to get that thing for 20 minutes as he crawled under stacks of books and magazines, and hid under toys. Eventually I got it with David's shoe and the looks on the boys' faces as their mother became a crazy woman, whacking that thing about a million times and screaming in terror, was priceless!
There are the ticks that I constantly have to remove from our cats as well as, occasionally, some of the kids.
The frogs come out in droves whenever it rains and I've stepped on a few as I've raced to the front door. The best was the one that I inadvertently kicked as I ran and boy, that little frog went flying!
Of course there are our nocturnal visitors that love to get into our trash and eat the leftover cat food. David wants to shoot them but I've brushed up on my broom swinging abilities as an alternative.

Really, they are kinda cute!

But then there was the morning that I brought in groceries, unloaded all of them in about 10 minutes, walked back out to my car to get something, and upon walking back up to the house saw what I thought was a piece of rope on top of my flowers. Turns out it was a snake skin...some horrible, gross snake had slithered his way across my front yard in that 10 minutes that I was in the house. Thank goodness it wasn't while I was outside.

But of course where there is one snake there are sure to be more...and this month we have had several. Savannah almost stepped on one on our front porch and we have had two in our backyard.

Googie got ahold of one of them and had a grand 'ole time turning it into a toy.