Critters in the City

West Bountiful started out as a farming community in 1847 and still has a rural feel to it even though it's split in half by Interstate 15.  Our home, once on a fifty acre farm, now sits on a quarter acre about half a mile from the Interstate.  From our upstairs windows we can watch to see how the commute is going.  Nevertheless there is still a "slightly" country feel as we have a controlled creek running in our front yard and lots of critters.  The creek was once an honest-to-goodness creek in its own right but years ago became part of the irrigation system in the area so it usually only flows from April to November which is fine with us.  More on creek improvements later.

This post won't be about the remodel but some of the joys of an old house.  When we first moved in the home had been empty for almost 8 months and abandoned for about 6 of those before the ex-husband got it out of foreclosure.  By the time we moved in at the first of August the house was full of spiders and bugs.  And there was plenty of evidence of mice as well.  It took well over a year to get the bug problem under control and we haven't had a bug or mouse problem in years.

The following photos will give you a sense of why we feel out in the country despite our actual physical location.

Our latest visitors - somehow they safely cross the freeway

One of the original occupants - one of many

Mom and Dad

Mom and Dad again

One of the kids

The first autumn we came home one evening to discover a large barn owl flapping weakly by our back door with a damaged wing.  A friend who works with wildlife took the bird to a raptor center in Ogden where we discovered it was a female and too badly injured to save.  The raptor folk came to look for a nest and chicks but with no luck.  A few days later our son-in-law saw the mate and discovered quite a large hollow in the large tree in our backyard.  The bird people came back and discovered three cold eggs.  But it wasn't too long and we saw our male had found a new partner.  The hollow has probably been used 4 out of the 6 years we've lived here.  During April and May we can hear the chicks screeching every night for food and see the father circling through the trees.  And of course there are the occasional small rodent body parts and pellets they hack up.  The photos were taken out of a second floor bedroom window since the tree is only about five feet off the back part of the house.  Normally we only see them flying at night or occasionally on a limb but if there are several babies there's no room in the hollow and by June mom and dad are forced outside during the day.

A surprise for the heating guy - an old hornet's nest

An abandoned vent taken over by a new tenant.

A drop-in guest

Every spring except for this one birds built a nest in the chimney of the den fireplace.  And every year a big storm would knock the nest loose and we would have two or three baby birds behind our fireplace shell.  Fortunately the shell is still disconnected so while our dogs got all excited by the chirps I would pull it out, catch the birds and release them outside.  It was amazing that it almost always happened about the same week each year - perhaps it had to do with the weight of the babies reaching a certain point.

A baby finally comes down

One of three 

One day two years ago we found a baby raccoon in our backyard.  We didn't know what to think and it died within hours.  Shortly after that a second and then a third showed up.  By then we assumed something had happened to the mother.  The third one we actually saw coming down out of the tree.  We hoped to save the last one and even had someone coming to claim it when it too died despite our best efforts to keep it warm and feed it.  We believe the problem was they waited until they were close to death until they were willing to leave their shelter.

They liked our stream

They only spent the afternoon but it was fun watching them

So that's how critters in the city make us feel like we're in the country.  Another nice fact is that all the residential part of our town is west of the Interstate and all the commercial on the east side.  I'm a mile from Lowe's on one street and Home Depot on another but they're in another world.