Nature in our yard

Wednesday, when it was bitingly, bitterly cold, I was sitting at the kitchen table, ostensibly working on the novel but actually emailing with Miss Valerie, when a coyote sauntered through our backyard. Stunned, I watched it through the window until it was out of sight, and then promptly changed the topic of whatever our conversation had been:

Me: ....Holy [bleep], a coyote just trotted across our back yard! Glad Bailey* wasn't out (although she probably outweighs the coyote and could defend herself just by sitting on it).

Val: A coyote?? Wow. That's what you get for living by the river. What does a coyote do when it's 15 below zero? How does it keep warm???

Good questions, and I don't know the answers. What do coyotes do when it's -15F? And how do they keep warm???

Unfortunately, the camera wasn't within reach -- and honestly, I was stuck on "OMG, that's a coyote!" and too astonished to even think of going for the camera until after the fact. I've seen coyotes around here before (as Val pointed out, we do live by the river, and that part of the river happens to be within a state park and nature preserve, so there's wildlife galore)...but never in my own backyard. I'm not quite sure that I like this development, but at the moment it was kind of cool.

But wait, there's more.

Yesterday (Friday) around twilight while Pete was off whooping it up with the biking crew, I went from the kitchen into the living room to grab something and didn't bother turning on the lights. Now, there's a large shrub just outside the front door and next to the big window, and in the last light of the setting sun I saw...

[insert dramatic pause here]

...the silhouette of a pair of large ears just above the shrub.

My first thought was that it was the coyote paying a return visit and getting entirely too close to the house. (This was wildly implausible, because one, the ears were the wrong shape and too big, and two, that's a good-sized shrub, so if it was a coyote skulking around it, it'd have to be an awfully big coyote for just its ears to be showing, but I didn't think of those things until later.) I didn't like the thought of Mr. Coyote hanging out by our front door at all, so I kept the lights off and crept toward the window as quietly as I could with the notion of sneaking up on the critter and then yelling and banging on the window to scare it so badly that it wouldn't return, ever.

Well, when I got closer I saw that it wasn't a coyote: it was a deer. A young deer, maybe a yearling, and he or she (the light wasn't good enough to tell whether it was a buck or a doe) was eating our shrub. Surprised and a little outraged, I stopped sneaking and said, loudly, "Hey!" The deer startled and skittered back a few feet -- but only a few feet. It stood and stared at me through the window, and I stared back, and the girls came upstairs and went "Oooooh, a deer!" and then it and two other adult deer that I hadn't noticed took off across the front yard and bounded away toward the river.

This morning there are deer tracks in the snow all through both the front and back yards. I'm also noticing that there are an awful lot of doggy-like tracks all over the place...and they're way outside of Bailey's door-to-potty-and-back-to-the-door range (she does not care for cold and snow one bit, and only goes outside when forced by necessity or great mean people who make her go for walks: in other words, those aren't her tracks).

Hmm.

Deer in the yard...Coyote(s?) in the yard...Gosh, could the two possibly be related? o.O

I need to start keeping the camera within reach at all times.

I also think that now might be the time to sign up for that shooting class (guns, not cameras) I've been meaning to take. Venison, yum.

(That is a joke! Of course I would not shoot a gun in the 'burbs.)





*Our small, fat dog.