Wildlife Highway

We live on Tupelo Ridge Drive, in a house we sometimes call 'Rancho de los Gatos.'

Two humans live here but the three felines who allow us to reside with them, collectively rule this place.

But it clearly wasn't always this way, and if the two humans and three
cats who currently call this small piece of property home did not
occupy it, many, many other critters would.

In fact, the critters who live around this place are constantly trying to evict us so they can move back in.

Regardless of what the Los Angeles County Tax Assessor or the County
Recorder or Countrywide Mortgage or Tom Gapen thinks, this piece of
property on Tupelo Ridge Drive belongs to them. The critters of Ranch
de los Gatos want their land back and they're never going to give up,
ever.

They're like little four and more legged insurgents periodically
amassing forces on the border and fearlessly launching raids deep into
enemy territory only to be fought back to positions in the rear where
they tend to their dead and wounded before regrouping and invading
again and again.

Some of them have defiantly never left and they live among us. We can scarcely tell the enemy from the friendlies.

Unlike them though, we don't think of most of the critters who live
nearby as the enemy. We would welcome many of them to take up residence
anytime they like and we even encourage it. Just not inside the house
and unfortunately, that seems to be where most of them seem to want to
be. At least those with more than four legs.

The critters who would most like us to leave include, but are not
limited to, ants, bees, wasps, flies, gnats and countless other bugs
that I can not identify.

And spiders.

I'm not going to say that our house is 'infested' but before I moved in
here I had probably seen maybe a half dozen black widow spiders in my
life. Now, I could find a half dozen in a half hour. Fortunately they
tend to keep to themselves mostly in the garage, the shed, the deck
box, the cactus plants, the bushes and around the recycling bins.

We have quite a few black widows around here.

Those critters that we would welcome more readily tend to be more of
the furry variety and are found in large numbers. These include but are
not limited to opossums, squirrels, raccoons, coyotes and little
gophers.

There are also plenty of hummingbirds, mocking birds, crows, owls,
hawks and a ton of other birds that I have no idea what they are.

Oh, and a gazillion lizards.

And then there are the bunnies.

Linda and I are actually quite fond of bunnies so it's always kind of
heartwarming to pull up in the driveway and have a couple bunnies
nibbling grass in your front yard, even more across the street in the
neighbors yard and dozens of them, their little ears sillohouetted by
the street light, having what Linda calls a "bunny sock hop" down at
the corner.

Tupelo Ridge Drive got it's name for a good reason. It runs along a
ridge line that slopes down to a small valley below. Rancho de los
Gatos sits at the highest point of the ridge and we love to sit out in
the backyard, drink Jameson and Cabernet and watch traffic streak past on Copperhill
Drive below us.

Inevitably, critters will enter what we like to call the 'Wildlife
Highway' through our yard. The property is surrounded by a block wall
that serves as a perfect onramp to a busy throroughfare for animals.

Since we've lived here I've been looking at Zillow.com or Google Maps
images and other satellite photos of this street. For the first couple
of years the best images available were older satellite photos taken
before this tract was built back in 1985. I thought that was kind of
strange since many of the neighborhoods around us are much newer yet
there were already high-res satellite images available of them to view
at street level magnification.

My street had older, lower-res images but you could still see that there were
no streets on this hill yet. There were simply paths made by off-road
vehicles which likely followed what were previously foot paths which
likely followed what were previously animal foot paths.

I believe critters had been following the Wildlife Highway for many
decades before many people lived around here. And so they still take
the same route to get to food stores and cocktail lounges.

Yesterday, I was carrying a bag of trash around to the dumpster at the
side of the house. I turned the corner from the garage and there, out
in the open, right on the concrete slab that could be an RV park if I
had such a thing, was a dead rat.

He was no small rat either. He (I'll just assume he was a male) was
gray and had a long rat tail. Just like a rat does. Actually he was
kind of cute ... if he wasn't a rat, on my property.

He showed no sign of trauma and foul play was not suspected. His demise is as big a mystery as the Black Dahlia.

I haven't actually seen a rat on the Wildlife Highway before but other
people have. My brother for instance, when he was here visiting last
summer, said he saw one getting on the onramp. I had my back turned at
the time.

So, we know they live here too.

And that's fine, as long as they don't want to come in, which would not be a very good idea for them anyway.

Having kitties rule your house has it's advantages.