Ohio Wildlife

This week I saw a live raccoon, sitting on a garbage can right outside my kitchen window. He was a little surprised to see me, too, and left after a minute. That's the second live raccoon I've seen since we've been out here; the other one was washing its paws in the gutter somewhere on the way to Amanda's preschool a year or two ago. Dead raccoons, however, are all over along the roadsides.

At Christmas time in 2006, I saw a possum heading into our back yard. I once saw a weasel in another part of town. We've also seen deer at one of the golf courses, and of course we frequently see Canadian geese (just like people in most of the rest of the country do). Probably the most interesting goose sighting I've had was last spring when Amanda and I saw a goose sitting on a nest on a little island of grass in the parking lot of a big mall. I guess she wanted some visual excitement while she hatched her eggs; the location seemed less than ideal in other respects.

The birds in our back yard look remarkably like a page out of a "Birds of my backyard" sort of book; quite a different situation than things for me growing up way out west. Out there, the only cardinals and blue jays we heard or saw much about were sports teams. Here, they're actual birds that visit the back yard frequently from spring to fall.

And then there are the rabbits, squirrels, and chipmunks. The first time I saw a chipmunk out here, it took me a while to realize it wasn't a baby squirrel. We have lots of big, old trees by our place, including a hollow (but still living) tree, and lots and lots of squirrels to go with them. Every so often we get a bunny or two, but it seems that the bunnies prefer to spend most of their time one street away from us, where another blogging friend regularly reports on their activities.

I mentioned the dead raccoons awhile back; the "animal most likely to be spotted alive" along our roadways out here is the ground hog. We see them regularly on the way to church and just about anywhere else where there's a grassy hill; quite a surprise to my Western notion that groundhogs were mythical creatures associated with an obscure holiday in February. :)