Just prior to sun-up this morning I looked out my window and saw this. I have about an acre of land on which my house is built. The back portion is mostly wooded and kind of nice to look at when it's not infested with mosquitoes. I always knew there were a lot of animals back there, but seldom see anything other than squirrels and rabbits during the daylight. I don't know what made all those tracks through my yard, but it is intriguing to imagine what kind of critters they are.
I live on a hilltop and have a full-acre also.
I did clear another quarter of the woods to make a larger backyard, but left the denser woods to the top of the hill.
As development around us increased, more wildlife flocked to the woods behind the homes on my street.
The sparse forest over the hill beyond our property line was cleared and a few home built.
This leaves a huge open area the wildlife must travel through to get to the main forest.
But they always seem to return to the woods behind our houses several times a year.
As you said, it is hard to see them, even the larger animals.
I spook them when mowing the backyard near the woods, which makes them more visible as they run from the noise of the mower. Lot of deer forage behind our houses, and many other critters we can sometimes hear fighting at night.
We just had some deep snows here too, and I'm always surprised at the number of tracks they leave.
Had no idea so many came down from the woods, winding their way between my storage sheds, then down beside the garage. There is nothing but subdivisions north of me, no woods, so don't know where they go, unless it is down our street to cross over to another small woods.
Small animals we have tons of, everything from grouse and quail to turtles and who knows what all else.
Been here twenty five years and have seen at least once with my own eyes, deer, pheasant, skunk, possum, rabbits, squirrels, snakes, fox, coyote, and a large cat-like critter I never did identify -- it would make a full grown German Shepherd look small. We have an assortment of birds that range from crows, blue jay, cardinals, an owl, woodpeckers, yellow finches, humming birds, a hawk, morning doves, and the usual assortment of sparrows and robins. There are quite a few I can't identify. Between me and the neighbor in back of my forest there has to be only an acre of wooded land. I have no idea why all those critters would want to live on such a small island forest in the middle of an urban environment. They must be desperate for space is all I can think of, but what the heck do they all eat? I am truly amazed.
i'm in a stone village in the middle of hundreds of vineyards. I saw more wildlife living in Toronto than I see here. seen a fox, lizards, bunnies and a couple of dead badgers, deer. loads of birds, especially raptors and swallows, but that's it...
of yogi's tracks I can only see a fox and a bunny been visiting. it must have snowed to obscure the shape of the spore, but looks like something big came to the window.
The cat scared me to be honest. It did look like a bob, but I wasn't close enough to be sure. The big critter tracks are almost certainly deer foot prints. There is a whole family of them back there somewhere.
In the UK, fallow deer like to inhabit woodland. They're herbivores, so feed on grass, leaves, acorns, sweet chestnuts, young shoots, heather, cereals, bark, herbs, and berries. Woodland also gives them shelter.
The stretch of woods behind our houses is like 1/4 acre wide at the narrowest, to 3/4 acre at the widest, but extends for a full mile.
Not counting reptiles and birds, our local Forest Service says over 150 species of mammals are found in any wooded area five acres are larger. If you add in birds, the number jumps to over 300, and it is impossible to determine how many types of reptiles, since the lizard family alone comprises many thousands.
Also, the number of animals who stay there depend on their normal behavior patterns. Some migrate, some follow seasonal or rotating food sources. If you have larger wildlife, they can easily become overabundant for an area and begin to cause damage if they do not move to another area.
The food chain they rely on has widely varying cycles. If only one item is in short supply, it affects the entire ecology by upsetting the available food chains. Lack of food will force wildlife to another area temporarily. As the overworked area recovers they return again until it is again overworked.
FWIW: Even on our private lands, the forest service will come and thin certain areas of our woods, with our permission. This allows new growth to draw the smaller critters which form the lead end of the food chain. They never over-thin any area larger than like 1/5th of a section in any five year period. I've lived here only a decade, and they only thinned a small area along our property line once. A couple of years later, they cleared a larger area about 1/4 mile away. They leave what they fell for insects and lizards, but not in the exact area they clear, it is pushed in a pile to one side.
When I cleaned up some of my hill up to the woods, I piled everything in a huge pile behind my sheds. The pile was over ten feet tall at the time, now it is less than a foot tall. But for years we had quail, grouse, and turtles, who made their home in the woodpile. Probably a lot of other things I haven't considered, like the snakes which we have in abundance here.
If you go sit up near the woods and just stare into it for an hour, you will see all kinds of activity, and probably spot at least twenty different small critters who venture out during the day. A whole different hoard of critters after dark.
Yes it is.
I have pictures of our family of turtles from when they were tiny to when they grew up.
Never saw turtles before a couple of years after I made the woodpile, but found their nest, without disturbing it.
Have not seen a turtle now in probably a couple of years, but then I don't get up on the hillside much anymore either.
Because we have dogs in a fence, about the only thing we see inside the fence are rabbits and squirrels, and of course the field meeces and moles.
But if you look beyond the fence into the woods, and sit perfectly still for awhile, pretty soon you see all kinds of little critters, the majority of which I have no idea what they are, unless they are very commonly recognized creatures.
Earlier this year, I had a 50 pound bag of wild bird seed I found those darn little flying bugs in. Got out the garden tractor and cart and hauled the bag up to the top of the hill and scooped the seed out of the bag, tossing it into a bare spot in the woods, and a little in other places too.
I kept my eye up that way and saw plenty of movement over the next few days after, but too far away to tell what the critters were. The frau said she saw a small deer near the fence, but by the time she got her camera with the telephoto lens out, it was gone.
We planted several butterfly bushes of different varieties, on the other side of our driveway, and a couple of them attracted more hummingbirds than butterflies. We plan on buying some more of that particular one, if we can find them, and put them on the other side of the house outside the den window.
I imagine their are plenty of turtles, it's just I don't see them hiding.
I have shallow pans of water in my yard, about the size of the trays you carried your food in at school. Maybe a bit bigger.
I don't remember for sure, but the reason I saw the turtles by my office door so often, could very well be it was a dry season, and my keeping the trays of water full all the time, attracted them to get a drink.
Currently, I have to fill them by hand using a bucket of water, because the outdoor water spigot near the garage split its underground pipe a couple of years ago. When the faucet still worked, I had the pans lined up about five feet apart from each other, all the way down the hill with a 1/4 radius open pipe between them. It was just a matter of turning on the faucet for one minute each morning, and it would fill the top pan which drained to the next, to the next etc. till all the pans were filled.
Now I only have three pans which are not connected together. One bucket of water fills all three pans. And after seeing the turtles, the top edge of each pan has a wedge of rock so a baby turtle could get back out of the pan easily. Even so, I have not seen turtles on this side of the garage in at least two years.
Because of mosquito's they do not like us to have bird baths, or standing water, unless we empty and refresh them daily. This is one reason why I use the shallow bakery trays. Without adding water, they will evaporate in a day during the summer. Also easy to flip over to knock the ice out in winter. There's always a few birds playing in them, so I have to clean them often anyhow. I usually do the pans first, then fill the bird feeders. Sorta like my morning ritual.
I suppose you could get round the still water/mosquito problem by having a bird bath which has a fountain on it, like you might put in a pond. The solar ones work quite well I hear.
We have a couple of decorative fountains Icey.
I even have filters on them to help keep the water cleaner.
But they are such a pain to maintain, over just filling water pans everyday.
I must admit that I don't understand about the maintenance of these things Gary. My friend had a waterfall-type effect bird bath. I've never seen them clean it out or do anything to it, but it looks fine to me, and attracts plenty of birds.
Don't know if you recall my mentioning it, but back home at my old house.
I had used a plastic T-fitting for an aquarium airline, and some silicone airline tubing.
That little hose which fills your toilet after a flush, often wastes a considerable amount of water, once the bowl has refilled. I installed the plastic T-fitting in this hose and ran the silicone tube to my birds water dish, and a larger hose from it to outside under bush. So every time I flushed the toilet, the birds water was refreshed. Provided he didn't get too many seed hulls covering the screen.
This next part might be a little over your head, because of the source of the device.
I think you know what the old style fill-valve for a toilet looked like, the one with the big ball at the end.
I obtained a tiny version of this fill-valve from an old furnace humidifier unit.
It was hooked up inside the base of a statue in a bird bath waterfall type decoration. Using an ice maker tube from my basement out to the birdbath.
So every time the water level dropped down a little, it kicked in and filled the waterfall back up again.
It also used a Little Giant pump to circulate the fountain water, which ran a little hotter than most pumps.
So even in the dead of winter, at least a small part of the fountain kept fresh water flowing.
Inside under the statue where the pump and valve were, it would never freeze. But the little hose bringing water to the fountain would. It was too small to wrap heat tape around the tube, so I used two short heat tapes with the hose between them, and placed black foam over this combination. I had moved the fountain from the middle of the yard, up against the house after a bush died, so we were only talking about less than ten feet of tubing, so I let the ends of the heat tape stay coiled inside the housing under the statue.
Even at only three degrees outside, the bowl of the birdbath still had at least a good foot of unfrozen water for the birds to play in and get drinks.
Those who did play in the water often splashed water up and over everything, which quickly froze. So by the time of the spring thaw, sometimes there was a mountain of ice over the bowl and long clunks of ice hanging down each side of the fountain.
I built a six foot by eight foot fountain in front of our flower shop and we kept it running all winter too. I learned the first year that salt alone does not keep the water from freezing. So during the winter I had to place a screen over the pool of water to keep the birds from drinking it, because we used a type of antifreeze that also marked as safe, I still didn't trust it.
Our greenhouses were heated with steam from the boilers. So while the parking lot was dug up to replace one of the steam lines, I added a shut-off valve and steel steam lines up to the fountain, and placed a half inch coil of soft copper in the bottom of the fountain. Since I didn't have a return line for the steam, and knew I was just stealing a little bit of it for the fountain, I let the excess steam pass through a foam bubbler like one would use in an aquarium, only much larger. It was a straight bar I placed all along the width of the back of the fountain. I used the valve to control the water temperature and only kept it around 40 to 50 degrees, so there wasn't all that much steam escaping, but it really looked neat in the winter.
Being along a highway, kids were forever stealing the fountain heads, and I finally quit using fountain heads and just made a solid set of pipes for the water display itself. Wasn't as fancy, but never got stolen either.
Some kids would occasionally throw something in our big fountain. We were near a scuba shop, and they often tossed dye markers to color the water. Although it looked cute, I didn't know if it was safe for the birds who drank from the fountain. So it was always a quarter day chore to empty, clean, rinse twice, and refill the fountain.
I was told some time later the dye markers are safe and would not harm birds or fish, but I didn't know at the time.
Every time we have a visitor who's car leaks something in the driveway, I'm out there with my clay granules to soak it up and dispose of it. If it came out of a car, other than AC condensation, it will probably kill a bird, animal or pet.
This is one reason I get so angry at companies who have outdoor tanks of various chemicals with openings birds can get into. Although they know not to drink most things, some deadly things are actually appealing to them, or they are drawn to it.
The only things which I can think of, which're allowed to have open-top containers or be exposed to the elements (and thus birds and animals), are at water treatment plants, but there's no dangerous chemical that's stored without a lid or being sealed.
I agree about soaking up spilt oil, etc., as quickly as possible.
It could not rain into the open containers, because most were under open sided buildings, or had a roof over them.
But many did have tops on the huge vats, but the sides had openings which were always open.
Perhaps think of a tall parking lot dumpster you can open a slide panel on the side to put your trash in. Only these had a roof over them, like in a pavilion sorta.
Some were products they used, others were waste product they needed to be able to dump into vats easily.
Waste haulers would come and suck out the waste vats, and delivery companies would come and fill the supply vats.
Thankfully, not to many companies still have open vats used in this fashion anymore. Probably because most things are automated these days, using pumps to move materials from place to place.
Many dry materials unaffected by weather before they are used, are still stored outside, and the runoff from them can be hazardous to birds and wildlife.
I forget the chemicals and process used to remove sulphur from bituminous coal, but after washing it is simply piled outside in huge piles. Rain is allowed to rinse the chemicals from the piles. Where it goes after that can't be safe.
