Mammals

Eastern Gray Squirrels (Sciuris carolinensis) are always raiding our feeders and planting interesting things in the ground for us.

 Pandora loves boxes (which is pretty appropriate, if you know your Greek mythology). 

We frequently have opossums (Didelphis virginiana) around at night looking for food.  This one happens to be a mother, with one young opossum on her back and at least one more in her belly pouch (click the photo for a slightly closer look and see if you can spot the baby's face looking out!) 

This is Dot.  We adopted her from our backyard when her mother gave birth behind our shed.

Here are some baby racoons (Procyon lotor) that were huddling together in our yard one morning while Mother finished exploring nearby. 

 We adopted and made a house cat out of this mischievous girl, who as a youngster was eating all of our birds.  We named her Aurra, after a bounty hunter from Star Wars.  She still loves to sneak-attack all who pass. 

This night prowler shows up every now and then to tear up our pond looking for fish (or maybe he's just going for a swim).

Until we finally caught her and took her to the vet, this neighborhood cat gave birth to at least three litters of kittens in our backyard (including Dot, two pictures above).  We never named her, and have just gotten used to calling her Momma.   

I can’t figure out what kind of small rodents visit us (perhaps several species?), but every now and then we’ll see them raiding the bird feeders– usually at night (top picture), but this one (bottom picture) was out during the day.

 In the middle of the group in the top photo is another neighborhood momma that likes to give birth in our backyard.  We named her Grizzelle.  Before we were able to catch her for spaying, she had three litters of kittens.  That's Grayson with the white paws in the top left of the photo, one of her oldest offspring.  His brother we named Niles, and he's the yellow cat in the other photo.  There was a third cat in their litter, Jules, but I don't have a picture of her yet.  The other two cats in Grizzelle's photo are her most recent kittens.  We haven't named them yet.

I was stunned to open my front door early one morning to see... a nine-banded armadillo (dasypus novemcinctus Linnaeus)!  I know it's difficult to see, but this is the back half of it disappearing under our bushes, 

And then there are the Ewoks, that live upstairs in the Star Wars loft...