Backyard Visitors

Here are just some of the visitors who passed through our yard yesterday:



Shy Guy



A fawn


A new friend


Turkey poults


And Tony Peanut of course!

Puppy Countdown

The population of A House In The Woods will increase by one when we bring this little guy home on August 15th. Here Milo is just 6 1/2 weeks old!

The Sacred Peanut Bowl

This sacred object is more than just a humble plastic bowl I picked up at Walmart ($1.79). With its seemingly exhaustless supply of peanuts, it's the holy grail and siren song that lures squirrels and raccoons to our back door. Even the wild turkeys drop by just to snarf up the piles of discarded shells left behind by the squirrels and raccoons. Behold, the center of our universe here at A House In The Woods!

Just Passing Through

This wild turkey hen and her six poults are regular visitors to our lot, passing through at least several times a day. We've watched Mama Turkey successfully raise these babies since they were the size of paddle balls with legs no bigger than toothpicks. Since May, the poults have grown to more than half of Mama's size, and by early fall, they will be indistinguishable from the adult turkeys.

Early Sunday morning I was awakened by a series of clucks and grunts beneath my window that seemed to go on and on. Dragging myself out of bed, I looked outside to find an agitated Mama Turkey strutting back and forth across the front lawn, scolding and trying to round up her errant poults who were scattered throughout the garden. Like most adolescents, the poults are moving toward independence and at the same time testing their mother's patience. She finally brought them into some semblance of order and off they strutted, Partridge Family-style, into the neighboring yard. I went back to bed.

Mama Turkey has gotten so used to me that she no longer clucks the alarm and shoos her poults to safety if I accidentally run into her in the yard--just as long as I don't get too close.

The Peanut Junkie

I ended up taking out both screens. Tony Peanut was right back in the window this morning and since it was another volunteer day, I wasn't taking any chances.

Before I left, I placed an apple outside the back door. When I returned an hour later, the half-eaten apple was perched on the deck railing with Tony sitting nearby. That apple must have made a satisfying meal, because Tony refused to budge no matter how much I tried coaxing him with a peanut. But an hour later he was back, trying to cash in his rain check on that peanut.

So far, all of my postings have been about Tony Peanut. While he is a constant presence here at A House In The Woods, he's by no means the only denizen of our rural backyard habitat (just don't tell him that). So it's time for a new introduction.

The Dutch name for raccoon is wasbeer, or "wash bear," mainly for their habit of washing food before eating it. The cute guy in the photo above is Beertje (Dutch for "little bear"), who began showing up regularly at our back door last winter, although we think we met him before that. One night last summer, Mr. Michigander and I were having dinner in the backyard when a third uninvited guest had decided to join us underneath the picnic table. That fearless raccoon cub, we think, was Bear.

If it's the same raccoon, then Bear is probably a little over a year old. With his small size and dopey (but endearing) behavior, Bear still looks and acts like a baby and obviously was the runt of the litter.

He's a pretty well-behaved little guy and seems to enjoy hanging out with us in the evenings while we putter about in the yard. Once, while I was building a moss path, Bear trundled alongside me imitating my hand gestures and patting down the dirt around each newly laid section. When Mr. Michigander moved the outer door in the studio, Bear ambled in and out of the construction site, politely sniffing and exploring Mr. Michigander's tools and equipment but not getting into things.

He even tried to help us paint the front door one evening by dipping his paw into the can of paint. The red tracks he left can still be seen on our front porch. When we sat down to take a break, Bear sat behind me and gently combed through my hair with his paws!

Bear's almost complete lack of fear and his trust of Mr. Michigander and I both intrigues and worries me. For the price of a peanut or a few stale marshmallows, he'll be anybody's best friend. I don't know how or why Bear lost his instinctive fear of people at such a young age, and I worry that his fearlessness might get him in trouble someday.

Fortunately, Bear seems content to stay close to our property, dropping by nightly for his peanut fix. Sometimes he stops by in the morning for a "nightcap" before waddling off to bed in a hollowed-out tree on the northern edge of our lot.