The wild animals that live among us

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Fox behind our car in driveway

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Back in March of last year, a neighborhood cat (Lil Mama) decided our back porch was her new home. Since she wasn’t going anywhere, we put food out for her, and a box with a blanket in it. When it started getting cold this fall and she still hadn’t gone home, we added a heated cat bed and heated water dish.

There is a black cat that would sometimes come around and Little Mama would sit on the porch railing and he would meow up at her from below, so we call him Romeo. Sometimes he’ll come up and eat her food and they don’t seem to mind each other, but he is a little skittish of people and would never stick around.

Now it’s Vermont winter and it is getting really cold. So we set up a litterbox and food and water dishes in the guest room and opened the window so that Lil Mama could come in. Now she spends most of her time in there, separated from the rest of our cats, but inside, warm and comfy.

Tonight I went out on the back porch and saw that it was snowing. Since Lil Mama’s been staying inside I haven’t been filling the outside water dish or turning on the heated cat bed. But there was still some cat food out there for when Lil Mama goes out and for Romeo, and I saw that he had eaten it. Since it’s really cold and supposed to snow all tonight and tomorrow, I decided to fill the water dish and turn on the cat bed in case he gets over his fear and decides he wants somewhere cozy for the night.

I looked in the kennel to see if he was already in there, and, well… Instead of Romeo we have a possum camped out in the heated cat bed. That’s one cozy porch possum.

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Is it a wild animal if it is born in a zoo?
https://apnews.com/article/czech-republic-pygmy-hippo-zoo-583b061a728691bd1f618140a1615304?user_email=d156167c66e48cc7cd11735f68ab3b68187ad9bd121ddd04fc80900ffed05924&utm_medium=Afternoon_Wire&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_campaign=AFTERNOON%20WIRE%20JAN%2015%202024&utm_term=Afternoon%20Wire

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We had some mice in the basement. They were leaving traces (yuck) behind the faucet on a laundry-style sink. They were eating Lava hand soap of all things – there were large tracks missing from the soap. Apparently they can survive on soap due to the fat in it. I do wonder what the pumice does to their mini-GI tracts, though.

Anyway I used live traps, caught three, and released them in a huge park a mile away or so. Got the traps down there again to see if we get more. Then there’s the question: how did they get in to begin with?

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We have caught like 5 mice this year, not including any demolished by cats. It’s a big year for mice! My partner talked to a neighbor of his work, and they caught 20 mice in one day. We are in a rural area, surrounded by fields and some forests, but jeez, it’s a lot this year.

Most of them have been little, but I had to get an extra large trap because one of them had to have been like 3/4 of a pound, and 6 inches long not including tail. I drove that sucker a mile away before I let it go.

We found a frog in our well house (really a below ground concrete bunker with an opening at the top). Where did it come from? What did it eat? I walked it down to the pond that’s technically on the neighbor’s property, because ponds seem better frog habitat than bunkers with nothing to eat!

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I wore this bike helmet just a couple of days ago.

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Pigeons Aren’t Mindless Peckers

Not that it would be entirely an insult to the pigeons, though. Plenty of people I know are mindless peckers.

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Sounds like a band name and the name of their first EP, eh?

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