It’s a Wild Wild Life!

This has been a very interesting week as far as wildlife goes.  It feels like almost every day we’re having a surprise interaction with some kind of wildlife.

Over the weekend we turned onto our road and saw something playing in the road. It was 3 baby badgers just romping and playing. I couldn’t get the camera out fast enough to get a picture ~ but I did try! (I LOVE my Canon Powershot! It’s so small I can keep it with me all the time and it has almost no lag time between when you click the button and when it takes the pictures so I can get some pretty good shots!)

A while back we heard this weird noise on our roof. It was bugging me so much one night I went out with a flashlight to see what it was. As I walked outside this huge owl flew off the roof and over my head. It was amazing to watch it fly silently around the property to light on the roof peak again (right over our bedroom).

I didn’t think much of it after that, the owl came back every night, landed on the roof, screeched a bit and mostly was no problem.

The other day I was trying to get Hanna to take a nap ~ we were laying on our new big bed and it sounded like someone was walking around on the roof! I went and told Ryan to go check it out. There was nothing on the roof, but he pulled out the ladder and looked in the hole (where the vent cover SHOULD have been) and in our attic was a nice little family of owls!

I guess we were pretty lucky because the mama owl was in there the first time he looked ~ and I’ve since read that if they see humans around the next the mama will eat the babies. Luckily ours sound like they’re still up there.

As you can see we have created a perfect owl nest with our newspaper blown in insulation!  We’ve learned a lot about owls since we found them up there. It’s been a nice opportunity to teach Hanna about them (and learn a bunch ourselves).  Apparently the chances of these baby owls living to see their first year is relatively slim.  They frequently can’t find a place to nest or will be eaten by predators.

We’ve decided to make it a little easier for them, and we’re going to build nesting boxes to put in our trees. I think it will be great to help support our new baby owls, but also other owls that are looking for a place to nest ~ will certainly cut down on the mouse population. 🙂

Yesterday Hanna and I decided to take a walk before dinner. (I wanted to test out my new FREE MP3 player I got  preloaded with Micro Continuity information ~ a new project I’m working on) While on our walk we saw a baby deer come walking out of a clearing.  Then a few minutes later we saw a Doe and a Fawn walk across the road in front of us.

I am really grateful that we live where we do and have the chance to interact with nature and have some awesome encounters with wildlife.