Have you looked in your backyard lately?

 

It never ceases to amaze how close wild things will live in proximity to humans if given half the opportunity. You don’t have to live out here on the Branch to witness it, either.

So close do wild things come up against human habitat, you sometimes get the idea they’re just biding time until we leave. All kinds of wild things.

Last night Brian Loveland and I took our wives out to dinner in Tulsa. It is a custom of Brian’s, post meal, to drive through different neighborhoods in the vicinity of the chosen eatery to explore new neighborhoods, learn new routes “to and from” and otherwise familiarize ourselves with neighborhoods yet unknown to us. For me, you never know what strange neighborhood driveway is going to present a treasure trove of yard sale hunting and fishing gear. I’m always looking. I need more, right?

Somewhere north of the TU campus, along Jamestown, I spotted a wild cottontail rabbit smack in the middle of the neatest manicured yard, miles and miles from the nearest briar patch, that you could possibly imagine. The houses in that neighborhood are so close together (and beautifully maintained 1940’s/1950’s style) that there is practically no room for decorative shrubbery.

Wildlife habitat? I think not. But then I am a slow learner. The evidence is all around me and I see it all the time. A big bear might have amazed me more but not much. I saw a bear, by the way, standing next to a house last week while fishing up at Bennett Springs, Missouri.

“Look at that rabbit”, I said to Brian and the girls.

“Bet he likes that bush he lives under,” Brian said.

That’s right: The yard possessed one bush, a crepe myrtle, and who knows how many dogs, cats, and kids, all domestic predators, that love rabbit meat. Throw into this mix the certainty that where you see one rabbit, there are many, many more you have not seen. No rabbit is an island.

One evening years and years ago, I was standing in my backyard on Tenth Street and Washington in downtown Sand Springs, maybe a block from Ray Brown Park, when a covey of quail came into the trees in my backyard from the west, up around McKinley was my guess, covey calling to one another like crazy, and then flew off in the direction of the park, I guess to spend the night as the sun was going down.

This was about a year later from the time I heard a wildcat scream down in the same little low spot (hunting quail?) while I stood on the front porch taking in a little night air before retiring for the night. It was about six months before I had a screech owl fly over my head, warbling its weird call (spooky), while I loaded my pickup, pre-dawn, for a duck hunt.

If we are strangers in a strange land, we are not alone. That’s all I’m saying.

Have you looked in your backyard lately? There may be something there looking back at you.

Copyright © 2016 Conrad M. Vollertsen