| That's probably about a good distance. Too little distance to nature is... a thing. I'm like a half hour out of Ottawa. Gotta take it slow down the driveway because sometimes the deer like to hang out there. And in the yard. And generally everywhere. More than once I've wandered out and found a fox standing at the sliding door staring at a cat. (They are super cute though. Watching them they look like really playful dogs.) We have cats because of the mice. When the snow melts we get enough standing water that the ducks come and nest here. They're not much of a nuisance, but I worry about them with the foxes prowling around. The rabbits aren't bad either, but there seems to be a lot of infighting with them. Had a coyote show up one time. Opened the door and asked him what the fuck he thought he was doing and he hasn't been back that I've been able to see. I'm not a great tracker or anything but I can do a decent job of differentiating the tracks in the snow. I'm told turkeys are hard to hunt. For a good chunk of the year if I just opened my door and tossed a brick there's no way I could miss. Made the mistake of seeing some groundhogs around and thinking "eh, they're all the way over there they're not hurting anyone and we have lots of space" and then found the posts supporting the roof of my garage sitting on top of a big hole. Pretty sure I've been hearing one under my house trying to chew his way in when I'm trying to sleep. Tried all the deterrents suggested and they really don't care. My wife wanted to trap them and go release them on someone else's property. I started out with lots of patience, .22 rounds, and good aim until they seemed to catch on. Now I've been haphazardly throwing some 7.62x39 at them. The mosquitos are atrocious. Thankfully that meant I had some decent pesticides on hand for when I walked into the shed one day to a pile of sawdust and found out there are ants that will eat wood. They'd also decided to move into my mailbox. I also have some herbicides for the poison ivy and do my best to not mow it because I don't really want to be hospitalized. It's hard though because when you're up on a tractor we have a _lot_ of plants that look pretty close and if you don't mow the hell out of the edge of the forest it expands very quickly. Speaking of hospitalized--made sure I was up-to-date on my tetanus and stuff. I don't know if I'm the only person crazy enough to care but that was a whole fucking thing to find someone to do that preemptively. Oh, went out to clear the snow today and chewed a mouse up with the snowblower because of course. I bitch, but I really do just try and see myself as the keeper of this nature. If it weren't for the mosquitos and groundhogs it'd all be pretty good. |
LOL, I've done that too. I figure it must have been dead prior to being chewed up because snowblowers announce their presence fairly definitively.
We're probably much more urban than you, but we've got a ravine connection to the greenbelt, so do get all of the above. Has been a bear in that ravine, but didn't see it ourselves.