I live across the street from the Prairie Path, so a lot of animals wind up in my backyard. It's a favorite place for stray cats to fuck, and that is a horrible sound to hear in the middle of the night. Birds and rabbits and squirrels, obviously. Mice and rats. Every once in a while a coyote, but they rarely wander from the Prairie Path. It happens, but not often. Skunks and opossums by the hundreds. Ducks if its been raining. Once I found a frog back there, although they also usually stick to the Path itself and don't wander. Once I even saw a baby beaver who had to have been lost. The only animal I've seen on the Path but not in my backyard is deer. They're a rarity, too.
A lot of times those animals wind up dead in my backyard. I remember one time there was a dead rat that I accidentally stepped on because it was morning and I thought it was part of the undergrowth. I'm not talking an ordinary rat. I'm talking the kind of thing Brad Dourif would hunt in Graveyard Shift. Fucker was huge. I brushed it out of the way with a broom to handle later, after work, but when I returned it was gone except the fur, so I'm guessing something ate it.
Dead mice and birds and rabbits and such are common, but the other day I was talking with a neighbor who was helping with the garbage and recycling bins (which I can't do anymore because of my bad foot and my increasingly bad hands). I happened to look down and saw I was stepping on a dead bird.
No, wait. Correction. I was stepping on *pieces* of a dead bird. I stepped back and made this observation, scraping my shoe on the concrete, and my neighbor said that we get hawks all the time.
Not necessarily. They're there, of course, but they don't swoop down often and kill something in my backyard. (Although, come to think of it, maybe that's what happened to the rat. But if that's the case, why didn't the hawk peck away at it after dropping it from a height high enough to kill it?) I once saw a Peregrine Falcon perch on my bedroom window so it could raid the sparrow nest under the gutter. But it doesn't happen a lot.
Nature is a place of life and death, but I never really thought of my backyard as a theater for such things until now. It's a beautiful place in the spring and fall, but a lot of creatures die back there. I'm sure if I dug up my backyard I would find centuries of dead things in the dirt beneath the concrete slabs.
Such is life.
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