How’s this for annoying? Right when the show we had been binge watching on Hulu had started to get REALLY good, my husband, John, pressed “pause”. “Listen…I think I hear coyotes howling.” He was not hallucinating – we really could hear high pitched howling and yelping, all while sitting in the comfort of our family room in St. Paul. The city.
There are coyotes in the neighborhood, folks. There is even a Facebook page devoted to them, with reports of sightings - “Heading north along Beechwood Avenue”, and the like. I myself saw one saunter through our back yard a few weeks ago. It was unnerving; I quickly made sure my little dog, Dodger, was safely secured indoors.
The next week while taking a walk along the river, I saw this sign posted:
I was glad I was not walking the dog, so that I did not have to scoop him up and carry him the rest of the way.
Yesterday’s walk produced another delightful sighting: a Redtail Hawk - just standing there on someone’s lawn. She would occasionally hop up to a tree, survey the feeding zone, and then hop back down to another lawn. The neighbor came over to see what I was looking at. Together, we marveled at the fact that we had hawks and coyotes in our neighborhood. Paul said, “The next thing you know, we’ll be seeing a Black Bear walking down the street.”
There have been tales of raccoons going through the trash cans, which I do not find one bit delightful, and really too many chipmunks to count. A few weeks earlier, I had seen a hawk swoop down and grab a chipmunk in our back yard. A gruesome sight. But, all in all, it’s kind of exhilarating to see all this wildlife, literally in our back yard.
So, this week’s delight: coyotes and hawks, and any other wildlife we can experience from a comfortable distance in our city. I don’t know if the coronavirus is creating a better environment for these animals to thrive, because we are not invading their environment quite so much, or if I just have more time and space to notice them.
It was indeed to delightful to hear the coyotes howl. Now, back to the show.