Category Archives: Critters

We’re losing the war with the gophers. In fact, I’m not sure that we’re even fighting anymore. I can’t even remember the last time I saw the “gopher guy.”

The gardeners were here last Thursday and smoothed and filled everything back in. Five days later there are eight large holes.

I won’t use poison because of the likelihood hat it will in turn kill hawks, owls, or other raptors that could feed on the dead gophers. So if the landlord’s “gopher guy” doesn’t come back and do a better job than he has in the past, I think the only option is getting a sleeping bag and a pitch fork and camping out on the front lawn. When I hear the next hole being dug near me, I can jump up and impale the little monster with the pitch fork!

We may all safely assume that particular plan will be put into effect right after Hell freezes over.

They were back. I think it’s the cookies. The plastic container with the last of the cookies is covered with tiny bite marks where something’s been trying (unsuccessfully) to get in.

And today I used the iPhone instead of the Canon so that the autofocus was in charge, not me.

Gonna be a long weekend, I think.

As our back yard drops off down the hill to the back yard of the house below us, there are a couple of retaining walls made with railroad ties. By mid-morning these are all exposed to the sun, and they get toasty. They make an ideal place for the lizards to bask, soaking up photons with a quick escape route just over the edge and down into the cracks between the ties.

This dude was living the good life, obsessed with something down the hill. It wasn’t the one that’s missing its tail that I saw a couple days ago – it was there with this dude, about five feet to the right.

Whatever this one was looking at, it had its full attention since he was ignoring me, just four or five feet away. Now, **I** know that I’m not a threat, but generally the lizards don’t and they’re bugging out as soon as I get within about ten feet.

I finally cleared my throat and shuffled my feet a little, and got this nasty side eye look that said, “I know you’re there, don’t you see me ignoring you?!” About that time the shadow of a raven passed over and Lizard Attitude Dude was over the side and gone in a flash.

Maybe he did somehow know that I wasn’t interested in eating him whole, where that raven probably had a different opinion. Life on the edge, with the quick and the snack.

We always have a squirrel around. There are lots of trees on the hill in back of our yard, a big one in our yard itself, many in the neighbors’ yards. We put out a fair amount of food every day for the birds. Trees + food = a squirrel.

Sometimes we see two squirrels. Especially in the spring, chasing each other all over… (insert that deep bass “French-sounding” “uh-Huhn-HUUUHN!” sound here that means “You know that we’re talking about sex now, right?” – is there a word for that sound/phrase/thing?)

Earlier this week there were THREE squirrels out there. It might be the cookies that we’ve been throwing out for them in addition to the bird seed.

They’re all fat and fuzzy, no doubt about it! I grabbed my camera and started shooting…

Only to find out just now that, as fuzzy as the squirrels were, my pictures were even more fuzzy. As in, “badly out of focus.”

This is not an artistic choice, but rather a reminder that, no matter how many tens or even hundreds of thousands of pictures I’ve taken with that camera over the last 20+ years, I still need to make sure I check that the autofocus is engaged if I’ve been shooting pictures of the moon the previous night and had it on manual focus.

The problem is obvious. User error.

When I was a kid we used to catch these guys all the time. Never bothered me.

Their offspring must remember, because here and now, sixty years and a couple thousand miles away, they tend to lie in wait and then fly up into my face and scare the crap out of me.

I hope that the fence lizards feast on them!