It’s all well and good to travel for hours on an airplane to get to some exotic locale, and then ride in a jeep or on horseback or be carried piggyback by native sherpas deep into the wilderness to get a fleeting glimpse of the greater-spotted pugmoose in its native habitat, but one expects to be thrilled and excited by that. It goes with the territory, as it were.

I’m grateful for the urban wildlife that surrounds us, the wildlife whose native habitat is also our native habitat. For example, when I lived in Boston, a friend of mine told me about the night she ran out to drop a bag of garbage in her apartment building’s dumpster, and just as she was hoisting the bag to shoulder height to drop it in, she heard something moving and stopped to see what it was she was about to squash with her kitchen scraps, grease-soaked paper towels and used tissues. “Oh dear, there’s a kitty stuck in the dumpster,” she said she thought, until the moonlight caught the white stripe running down its back.  She just put the garbage bag down gently beside the dumpster and tip-toed away. But she thought it was pretty cool, nonetheless, and so do I.

We have barred owls in our neighborhood in Decatur. Those are the ones whose cry sounds like “who? who? who cooks for you?” Well, that’s one of their cries. They also make a sound like a couple of banshees locked in contest to see which can strangle the other to death. It’s very romantic. Especially since they’re loud as hell. I was out soaking in the hot tub on our back deck one winter evening when one of the damned birds flew over about 10 feet above my head. Wingspan like a B-52, screaming “WHO COOKS FOR YOU!?”

“I cook for myself,” I cried, “please don’t kill me!” It’s a wonder we have any rodents in the neighborhood for them to eat. If I were a rodent I would have had a heart attack or moved into the safety of the Kroger loading dock ages ago.

There was a bit of a coyote scare last year, with people attributing all sorts of mischief to them. Missing cats, stolen bicycles, kids turning to drugs. Coyotes just seem to be a bad influence, although really, they mainly just eat rodents, too. I thought they were an urban myth, but one morning I had to drive to the airport at 5:00 AM, and as I pulled out of the garage, I saw something that looked like a miniature German shepherd slinking out of the neighbor’s backyard with its tail held out horizontally behind it. Coyote. How cool is that?  For some reason the urban coyotes around here don’t howl at the moon, though. I think they’re afraid of the owls.

We have red-tailed hawks in the nabe, too. Beautiful creatures to see circling high overhead, and majestic-looking when you spot one on the top of the church steeple (a favorite lookout spot) a couple of blocks down the street. Their young are obnoxious, though. They screech non-stop from dawn until dark. They literally do not seem able to exhale without screaming. And they don’t like to fly. We watched one in our backyard jumping from the ground to a low tree limb, and then to a higher limb, and then to a higher one, until it was about 20 feet off the ground, at which point it spotted a squirrel on the ground and fell on it.  The squirrel was merely stunned, and the baby hawk (I say baby, but it was bigger than a good-sized chicken) had to jump up in the air and land on it several more times before it was sufficiently dead to be eaten. At which point Baby just screamed for Mom until she came and tore it up into convenient bite-sized chunks for him.

Why am I grateful for all these creatures? Ask yourself what they have in common: they eat squirrels. And what do squirrels eat? My house.