Wildlife

So already we've met several wild animals at our new house--and not just squirrels like at our apartment. We'll start with the neighbor's weimaraner--a lovely dog named Maya. She sits outside the girls' windows on her patio or in her yard, and tends to bark at various animals. She has a lovely deep "woof" of a bark, that Talitha loves to hear. When Talitha hears Maya, her face lights up and she says "woof-woof" and points in the direction of her room, since that's where she can see her when we're in the house. However, since weimaraners are rather large dogs, the children are all afraid of her enthusiasm when they are near her chain-link fence between our yards. They all say they like her, but they can't be near her.

Maya's owners have been blessed with a pair of mallards lately. They decided to make a nest of five eggs between the neighbor's driveway and their house in a little strip of garden with bushes in it. This has increased Maya's barking lately, as she does not want Lady Mallard near her territory. Mister Mallard has been known to sit in the middle of the street in front of our house, not even moving for cars to pass, but taking ownership of the road. Lady Mallard is a favorite of our children when she is in our front yard in the morning taking her morning walk. Now the two ducks prefer to do their bathing in our other neighbor's pool-cover water, however they have not been seen in ours.

We had been blessed with our own mother bird in our back yard as well. A mama dove had made a nest after we moved in on the top of our hose-reel in the back yard, right under our bathroom window. She had laid 3 eggs in it, and tended it faithfully. When she wasn't sitting with the eggs she was on a power line watching us in the yard. This week, we saw two baby doves in it, and boy, were they big! When we showed the children that the eggs had hatched, we lingered too long, at a safe distance, and Mama Dove came to warn us to stay away from her babies. She was about two feet from Forest's face to let him know they were her birds and not his. Today they had gone from the nest, yesterday they had almost out-grown their tiny home, we assume they had grown enough to fly away some time last night or this morning.

Yesterday we met our first yard frog as well. He was a little gray frog sitting on some of our decking. When we noticed him, we thought it would be fun for the children to see him up close. Forest tried to pick him up, but he didn't want to be held, and he jumped. Hannah ran away shrieking saying "I don't like frogs, I don't" and Nathanael backed away with a terrified open-mouthed face complete with shivers saying he didn't like it either. Talitha was too young to have fear of the unknown yet, and wanted a closer look. When she reached out to touch the little guy and he jumped away from her, she got nervous though. When Forest picked him up Talitha was the only one of the three who would get within a foot of him. We decided the frog would like to be in water, so we put him in the huge puddle on our pool cover, and he swam around for a bit.

Lastly, today when Forest returned home from work early (thanks to Kentucky horse-racing events closing down the city) he discovered we had been blessed with a family of rabbits too, and didn't know it. However, it was a tragic discovery, as he found four dead bunnies in our yard. Some other animal had gotten to them. Thankfully the children were all still napping when he got home and found the poor little things, so we didn't have to explain that to them yet. We asked the neighbors what else they had seen in the area that could have done it, and they both said they've seen raccoons and opossum in their yards in the past, but they thought more likely it was a cat that got to them since they were left in our yard.

The kids have been loving getting to know all the animals in our back yard and around our neighborhood. However, none of them really care for the worms. We look forward to meeting the next creature that comes to our yard--unless it's just mosquitoes.