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Critters

I love where I live. Granted it’s not on a 150-acre farm out in the middle of nowhere, nor is it in the mountains (which I would dearly love), but my home sits in the south-west corner of a 40-acre field, surrounded on two sides by trees. The funny thing about where I live is… I only own 5 acres of said 40-acre field. But it’s home. We have lived here for nearly 7 years now.

It’s also home to several Critters. Well… our little corner is actually the highway that said Critters take to get from one place to another. Occasionally  some of them will stop and munch on the alfalfa or clover we plant just for them. Turkeys, deer, the occasional rabbit, etc. But once in a while we will catch a glimpse of something else… or a few “something elses.”

It can be kind of scary on a cool, moonlit night, when the fog begins rolling in from the creek, or the swamp which is due east of us. I watched one evening as the full moon arose, bringing with it an Alfred Hitchcock sort of fog that literally rolled across the field toward my house. At the time, my house was just a 500-square foot cabin (My little “Rinky Dink Farm“). Needless to say, it was still spooky. Right along with the many coyotes that decided to begin their nightly ritual howling and yelping. Talk about eery…

Also at the time, we had a “humongous” teddy bear of a Rottweiler named Bo, who would give his deepest and best “Get out of my yard!” bark right at dark, letting the Critters know that they could only come up the field so far. He wouldn’t have hurt a fly… but they didn’t know that. And of course, there was Buster. My little Buster. All bark and no bite. He has the heart of a Rottweiler… all rolled up in a little furry, Chihuahua-mix of a dog. He’ll bark because there’s air. So Bo and Buster would keep the Critters at bay.

But how did we find out that we had these Critters, you may be wondering?  Well… our son-in-law Jake, loves to hunt. He wanted to see exactly what came across the field, and to see if it would be worth it for him to go deer hunting or turkey hunting. So, he decided to set up a “Deer Cam” down in the south end of our field. Since he and our daughter, Rachel, live on 1/2 an acre here next to us, we share our land. Little did we know when Jake set up his camera, that we were about to get an entertaining surprise. The Critters literally put on a show!


The deer came out in groups…

Although Bo is no longer with us, and we’ve added on to the house, we still get quite a conglomeration of Critters running to and fro across the south end of the field. Coyotes, deer, turkeys, foxes, rabbits, squirrels, hawks (of course they fly)… and on a rare occasion, we have seen a bald eagle!

Like I said earlier, I love where I live. We may not be the Ritz-Carlton, but God has blessed us, and we like our little corner of the field just fine.