Backyard Wildlife

Saw your reference to this thread, and decided to bump it up. Besides, I have a different backyard now. Mostly seeing blue jays, grey squirrels, hummingbirds, and the neighbor’s cat. Raccoons pass through at night sometimes, and the rats live in the attic (sigh).

Moose are the largest critters in our backyard.
This little bull was eating rose hips all morning.

We have mountains lions in this area. There was a mostly eaten small deer on my front lawn here a few months ago. But I wasn't here when it happened. I have only actually seen one Mt Lion around here, that was the same month and about a half mile from here. Saw it as I was driving back here during the night, about a quarter miles from here. Perhaps the same one that had a meal on my front lawn.

For small stuff, I have had many wild turkeys, a porcupine seen in my cameras at around 0300 hrs. Also a bobcat one night. For even smaller wildlife, Western Skinks, Western Fence Lizards, Northern Alligator Lizards and a little sharp-tailed snake in my garage which I caught and let go in the bushes in front of this house.

Also, a 3 foot long smashed Western Rattlesnake on the road up the block from here.

I am at 1,645 feet elevation in the sierra foothills, mostly trees with houses well spread out.

-Don- Auburn, CA

Does frontYard wildlife count here?

I bunch of wild turkeys came to visit me here today:

-Don-  Auburn, CA

Do eagles kill without eating? I ask because I wouldn't know. Outside of humans not too many things kill for the sake of killing.

What about backyard polar wildlife, anyone from Alaska here? I visited my friend there and saw a polar fox just near the house, unfortunately can't make a photo. Now I'm dreaming to visit Arctic

Fun to read these accounts, particularly during COVID, when it's especially been rich to experience nature doing its thing all around the house. We live in a classic suburban HOA neighborhood, bordering the national forest and open spaces of the Air Force Academy on the Front Range of southern Colorado. We have a small yard (by choice), but our neighborhood does not allow fences, so the yards essentially form large greenbelts that allow wildlife to travel freely. Our deer population is out of control. City voters last year voted down a cull. As a result, we can't grow ANYTHING edible, and spend a good deal of time each week picking up deer fertilizer.

Also as a result, we have every animal endemic to this region regularly traveling through our little grassy plots. Mountain lions thrive here, living in hard-to-access rocky outcrops on the academy. (I track them in the winter, but have never seen one myself in 20 years, though the local school has mountain lion drills and there are regular sitings.) Bears and bobcats are common. The local coyote pack got a good kill, they told me, the other night. Bighorn sheep and turkeys don't visit the yards, but we see them from time to time in the foothills. My wife loves to feed the hummingbirds and tracks them very carefully.

My favorite visitor to the yard this last summer was a rare one for us -- I had to have Merlin identify it as an ash-throated flycatcher. He was fun to watch for a few days of hunting his favorite prey.