Wildlife in the City

Every now and then it gets a little tiring that the neighbor's backyard barbeque at midnight on a weekday is twenty feet from my bedroom window. On days where the people make me crazy, the wildlife in the area helps to keep me on an even keel.

This morning was the regular bus routine, but stopping to smile at a baby chickadee - fully fledged, but still about an ounce lighter than all the massive three-ounce adults - doing its best to carry away a cookie from the bus stop. Nervous, tentative hops toward it in case the giants sitting on the bench were to attack, then a comical effort with neck craned backward to wobble away with a piece of cookie as big as the bird. Bird got the cookie, bench cheers!

In the park, we have obvious geese, goslings of all sizes, herons, loons, rabbits (though fewer now than before the plague purge a year ago), larks and ducks. The larks are to be found in many traffic crossings near water, since it seems like a good place for insects to congregate in the heat, swooping in daredevil arcs through the traffic pattern and coming up with bugs in reward of their aerial antics. The ones in traffic in slower areas swoop almost lazily. Aurora larks are slow enough to follow easily in their flight paths. Larks at Colfax and Colorado zip through traffic at high speed. The ones living under the gazebo in city park are far too fast to capture with my amateur camera. They flit in under the gazebo at such speeds that I wonder if they don't sometimes bounce off the back wall.

Red tailed hawks and owls have taken pigeons from our roof (and welcome to them, we have spares). Of course there are crows, ravens, sparrows, red-winged blackbirds, woodpeckers (one determined to get into the side of my house or the side of my lamppost), starlings. We have none of the swift little lizards that pop up in dryer and lower locales, but there are foxes in the park, and our neighbor has spotted one on the roof of our garage. We have raccoons, one of which took up residence under our back porch at one point, one of which startled me with a head the size of a football peeping up out of a storm drain. The raccoons are surely pilfering the trash. I'm amazed the foxes find enough to live on here downtown, and amazed at how well they normally hide. Laying out on the back deck one night netted sightings of at least three different types of bats, one of whom found its way under my old refrigerator in the kitchen as well.

The insect life is diverse enough to offer entertainment as well, from the lovely fat monarch caterpillar I found munching the onion stalks (leading to a butterfly with the worst breath in the world) to weird spiky ladybug larvae, darting dragonflies unable to handle a curve so they carve insanely angular paths over the back yard in Summer, and one dragonfly as fat and long as my index finger, bright green with an eight-inch transparent wingspan and looking like something out of the Cambrian, sitting on the sidewalk one day on my way to work. I was tempted to take it along if it were dead but know they can sit quietly waiting for prey, so figured I didn't need to lose a finger to the dinosaur bug by taking that chance. One of the prettiest pictures from my yard was a white spider as fat as the full moon weaving a web laced with raindrops in the middle of a thicket of tall grass, the brightest thing in a blue-grey day of rain. The neighbors, truly thoughtful as they more usually are, have taken to mowing this patch of grass for us, so I'm thinking of putting up a fence in defense of moonlight and ladybugs.