Suburban Wildlife

These two pictures of bobcats appeared in today's Santa Barbara News-Press. The article is subscribers-only so I haven't bothered to try to link. They were taken last week in the backyard of a house that adjoins Tucker's Grove County Park, which is a quarter-mile north of where we live.

Our neighborhood really is pretty classic California suburbia, but we butt up against foothills that are minimally developed, and the Los Padres National Forest boundary is about mile north of Tucker's Grove. We aren't that far from decent habitat for lots of wild animals, plus we have a lot of environmental diversity in a small area, as the elevation (south to north) goes from sea-level to 4000 feet in seven miles.

Our house is across the street from San Antonio Creek, an intermediate seasonal drainage. The San Antonio Creek arroyo is wide enough and has enough relief and cover that it serves as a wildlife corridor for all sorts of animals to come down out of the foothills into populated areas. I haven't seen or heard (if you've ever heard them in heat you'll never forget it!) these bobcats, but I wouldn't be surprised if they hadn't ambled by some evening.

We hear coyotes howling fairly frequently at night in Winter, and I have seen them many times walking on the other side of the street in the early mornings after coming up out of the creek bottom. We haven't had any real problems with them, however. Perhaps we don't give them many targets: our trash cans are covered, our dog food is always kept indoors and our dog is too big to be a temptation. And we are veterans of aggressive coyote behavior. When we lived in a more rural area (Tehachapi) one of our puppies was attacked by two coyotes at night in our backyard. They broke her front right leg, but she recovered to have a good life.

I think our most common wild mammal visitors are skunks. At night, at all times of the year. There have been countless nights that I have been awakened by rustling noises in the back-yard followed by that distinctive smell. Our black lab Maggie got sprayed once. We bathed her in a hydrogen peroxide-based concoction recommended by our vet to try to get rid of the smell. It bleached the tips of her black hairs white and gave her a kind of punk-rock dog look. Also there have been a number of occasions on nocturnal dog-walks that skunks have decided that the side-walk was theirs and we gladly gave them the right-of-way.

For some reason, we don't seem to have many opossums or raccoons in the neighborhood. I have seen them many other places in town, but not around our house.

Overall, I kind of like having them around. We don't seem to really bother each other. I also like that their home territory is a short walk away.