Your Big Backyard

[naomikritzer]

It's not that I object to sharing my back yard with the local wildlife.

But when a pair of raccoons wander into my yard while I'm eating dinner, I would appreciate it if they'd at least skedaddle when I stand up, yell, and wave my arms at them threateningly. Rather than giving me a look like they're kind of embarrassed for me, and then going back to digging for goodies in my yard.

There are cats in this neighborhood who are more skittish than these raccoons. I took some pictures of them; they were perfectly comfortable letting me get within six feet of them, and they were obviously aware that any yelling was just a bluff. Ed warned them that we actually have recipes for raccoon (we really do, and so do you if you have the old version of Joy of Cooking -- it also has cooking instructions for bear) but they weren't impressed.

Comments

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

There's always someone like that in an apartment complex. The first year we lived in our last place (on the eighteenth floor of a high-rise) our downstairs neighbour (I called her Mrs Nosy Parker) kept putting scathing, accusatory anonymous notes through our mail slot -- with copies to Management -- accusing us of endangering everybody's health and destroying her "beautifully-kept" balcony by raising pigeons on our balcony. Why? Well, we were stupid enough to leave a couple of cardboard boxes out there after we unpacked, and we were insufficiently tenacious (being out of the flat all day at our jobs) in shooing the pigeons away, and one of them laid an egg in one of the boxes...