Wild Kingdom

[ergophobe]

It's been Wild Kingdom around the homestead lately....

Aside from the robins that nested under the entryway eaves before I could shoe them out... lots of birds.

A few days ago, the first bears of the year came through the yard - a large fat sow after a mild winter in which she wasn't pregnant, since her yearling was with her. Neighbor left trash unattended "for less than five minutes" (come on people!) and they were at her front door peering in.

Then on Sunday we were walking and saw a fox cross the road. That's rare here. We sort of stealthily went down a side road to intercept it and came face to face with it about 5 feet away.

A couple hours later, my friend Sam and I met at my house to do a short run up to the bluff. As I was toiling along behind Sam (who is an absolute beast), I noticed what looked like drag marks. We stopped and followed them to the uphill side of the logging road and saw deer hair. Followed them to the downhill side of the road and say all kinds of tufts of hair stuck on the sticks below the road. And then we heard a big rustle in the bushes about 30 feet/10m away. Sam got a glimpse as a BIG mountain lion leapt out of the bushes and went airborne for a second (I missed it).

That last one was very spooky. We walked the rest of the hill throwing rocks into the brush until we were pretty sure we were well clear of the lion.

A couple months ago we were seeing 10 deer at a time in the yard. Then a month ago, the neighbors found a carcass in their yard. A week later, there was another carcass near another neighbor's house. This one that was killed on Sunday makes three *known* kills and for that one the brush was so thick we never saw the deer even though we were only 30 feet away, so there are probably more that just don't happen to be in places people can see them.

Haven't seen a deer in the yard in a couple of weeks.