Every day I am on the lookout for wildlife. And there has been plenty of it lately. Whenever I drive home at dusk or after, I see an adult porcupine saunter up the hill behind the barn. Great,  when the dogs get wind of that, there's a vet bill waiting to happen. When I went to pick some veggies out of the garden the other evening, a young porky was snuffling around in the nice clover patch that surrounds the raised beds.

A deer stands at the top of the hill and watches me feed my horses each evening. Her platter-sized ears have caused me to name her Big Ears. One evening she was even in with the horses grazing alongside them; I half expected her to come up into a pen and stand by one of the grain feeders waiting her meal. A flock of turkeys appears every day in some different place on the property--it is simply astonishing to watch them hoist those large bodies off the ground and fly.

Since spring, whenever I have gotten up in the middle of the night--an event that apparently triggers the "gotta-go" response in one or both of the dogs--there is a fox hanging around at the end of the driveway. She leaves scat in the middle of the driveway and does anything else she can to drive the dogs just nuts. Whenever I think she must have made her den nearby and everyone is gone by now, I spot her lurking across the street reminding me that this land is her land too. 

A week or so ago, I went to throw some hay and do a before-bed barn check. In order to get into the barn I had to wait for a young skunk to decide that running back and forth in front of the barn door was not accomplishing much for either of us. He walked toward me as if to check me out; I don't like to be rude, but I did not stand there and let him sniff my pantleg.

Over the holiday weekend we spent lots of time frolicking on the lake. Just as we were loading the sunfish back onto the trailer, two loons--who we had spotted several hundred feet away across the lake--popped up like messages in bottles right behind the half-submerged trailer. I think they wanted to observe our boat trailering skills. They reminded me of my father, who in his later years used to like to sit in the window and entertain himself by watching the neighbors, who always seemed to be getting into some jam or another. "Look at this, Cheryl," he'd yell "they're going to try it again. This is good." I'm sure these loons have seen some entertaining things.

The picture is one I took last fall when I was kayaking on our lake taking in the peak foliage. The loons had been vocalizing while I paddled, and I had seen them pop up here and there around the lake. Just before I was going to paddle into our beach and take the kayak out, one of the adults and a youngster popped up right beside the boat.

I am always on the lookout for wildlife and it is everywhere--squirrels cross the roads like animated commas, a chipmunk  sits up in the flower urn outside the porch door to get a more commanding view, the white flash of a deer hind end disappears into the woods on a dark night on a dirt road, a hawk checks for a meal from a utility line in Boston's Fenway area, the distinct silhouette of a kingfisher is outlined on the branch overhanging a pond, egrets and herons feed in a roadside swamp outside Concord. I even saw a pileated woodpecker fly down to the shoulder of the road as  I drove by this past spring, a first for me. 

And the wildlife seem to be on the lookout for us too. I think they like to observe us as much as we do them. Maybe ol' Big Ears keeps a Human Life List like I do a Bird Life List. What would that look like?

9/09/2009: Brown-haired female, middle-aged, walking in and out of barn

9/12/2009: Male, moving around unusually early, putting things into car, carrying something which appears to be a travel mug

The older I get the more likely Big Ears'  Human Life List will have the following notation:

12/31/2015: Gray-haired human living in red house seems to have migrated south for winter.