Critters everywhere!

The latest thing in the neighborhood is the appearance of so many crazy animals, I just had to write about it! Most notably, we've had a pheasant roaming around, a fox seen in our DRIVEWAY and a coyote down at the jetty where we walk the dogs!

For some of you who live in a somewhat rural landscape, these are not really all that exotic, but I live in a city. An urban metropolis! Well...not really a metropolis, but maybe a mini-metropolis! It's a proper city is what I'm saying! We have no skyscrapers, but it's a bustling city with lots of buildings and cars and such.

Now, the pheasant makes sense because our kooky neighbor down the street actually had a male and a female pheasant in this sort of strange coop he made for them. They could go in or out at will and they seemed pretty happy. They lived there for years until someone broke into his yard and opened up the coop about 2 months ago. I was very worried about them being able to find food, but apparently they're doing fine! I've seen the female down there a number of times running loose and, apparently, the male was seen on my street a few days ago!

The fox and coyote? That's not so logical.
But I guess there are plenty of prey animals in the way of rats around here. Our dog, Koty, has managed to catch a couple of them. Yick! The rats live amongst the rocks and nooks and crannies down by the ocean along all of the sea walls and jetties that have been built. I've seen dozens of them over the years.
They're totally gross! I'm generally not one who gets skeeved out by the little natures running about, but these rats are huge! Like the size of a cat, some of them. Not so cute and cuddly.

We've also got your regular urban-type animals living around here, raccoons, skunks and lots of birds. One of the coolest things I ever saw was in my back yard several years back. It was the night of the full moon and I heard the unmistakeable "hooooo hooooo" of an owl! I went to the second story of the house and was able to see this adorable, tiny owl: Well, it wasn't this EXACT owl, but it was this kind of owl - a saw-whet owl! Isn't he cute?

And, the only reason I knew what kind it was was because, at that time, I was working at a wildlife rehabilitation place and we actually had one there!

Ok. That's all I got for today. Have a good day!