Close Encounters of the Suburban Kind! Up Front and Personal with Nature in My Backyard

I'm a city girl through and through. I grew up in a major city and loved it. I consider New York City, especially Manhattan, to be almost an old friend. I love to wander the city by foot, and learn something about people and maybe life in general each and every time I spend a few days there. I love finding the little old hole-in-the-wall restaurants, finding a fabulous shopping bargain or two, and frankly, just interacting with all of the people that I meet.

Do I sound somewhat desperate for human interaction? Yes, I am! The city girl has found herself living for the past fourteen years in the wilds known as southern New Jersey.

I'm guessing that you, gentle reader, may have mixed emotions about the above paragraph. After all, it's New Jersey, home to the first indoor mega mall (Cherry Hill Mall), home to a former well-known racetrack (now demolished and home to a chippy, upscale mixture of condos and boutique retail). Princeton, home to the "Top University" in the country, is a half-hour away, as is Trenton, the state capital. Could I just stop complaining?

Honestly, I wish I could, I really do. It's been well over a decade since we moved to a very large, truly wonderful home sited on slightly over three acres of property in a quite private development of only thirty homes. This neighborhood is so private that several years ago, one of my neighbor's maids came out in the morning to shake out some rugs, and was attacked by a man driving by her home on a bicycle. The maid, who spoke no English, literally beat him off with the rug and stood screaming out in the driveway - for over twenty minutes, before another human soul heard her voice. The older gentleman who lives three houses away from us passed away - early last year. I found out about it a few weeks ago from another neighbor. When new neighbors do move in, I make a point of stopping by with a housewarming gift. Inevitably, they are both charming and gracious - and never seen again! When you're separated by so much land between homes, it takes a real effort to keep in touch, even with your closest neighbors.

Perhaps you've been thinking that I've been way off track of the title of this article. I wanted to express just how remote and isolated our homes are, separated by so much land. It is both a blessing and a curse. I've already given my opinion of the 'cursed' part of it; let me share some of the joys of being 'blessed' with a wide number and variety of God's creatures. (Many of them we see much more frequently than we do the older couple who live next door!)

When we first moved here, sociable young couple with quite young daughters, we used to host an annual Memorial Day pool party, to which we invited neighbors, old friends and new friends. (We stopped hosting that annual party after seven years. Inevitably, Memorial Day was cold, damp, rainy, and dreary. No amount of alcohol could fuel up those conditions!) It was perhaps our second year here when I mentioned that I kept hearing a series of "booms!" very early each morning. Two of my friends, nearly doubled over with laughter, called me "City Girl", and told me what those "booms!" were: We lived adjacent to a working farm. The sounds I heard at 6 AM or earlier were shotgun blasts from hunters on the farm. (I have absolutely no idea what was in season at that time of the year. We got into a deep conversation about the family who lived on the farm - quite wealthy, and apparently quite blithely unaware of the need for hunting permits, etc.) That occasion was the first time that I realized that I lived in - yes, it's true! - "the sticks".

All of this came as a huge surprise to me, but not to the woodland creatures who have continued to visit us routinely over the years. I remember the first time I saw deer in my backyard - about twelve feet away from my patio. My husband saw them first, and called out to tell me NOT to go outside. Apparently, the deer had wandered way out of their league, so to speak, and were pretty darned unhappy about it. A simple "Shoo!" would have sent these guys into such a state of frenzy that they would have possibly crashed through my glass triple doors, thus joining us at the breakfast table. Over the past ten years, developers have encroached closer and closer to our neighborhood. As a result, we see more and more deer in our backyard. They apparently come from a what's left of a large wooded area, gaily jumping over our neighbors' fences as well as ours. By the time they get to our backyard, they're often a bit tired from all of that jumping. They'll amble about a bit, checking out the grass and shrubbery. They'll gaze (longingly?) at our fenced inground pool area, but never venture too closely. Then the fun starts! They've been resting in my yard; they've kind of lost their 'momentum' to continue jumping over fences. It's really interesting to see them 'revving up' by racing around and around until they've built up enough steam to make it over our fence to our next door neighbors'. Sometimes, they'll all make it on the first try. Sometimes, most of them will make it, but there will be one or two straddlers left behind, seemingly shocked that "everyone else" is on the other side of the fence. Back to the racing around for a second (or third or fourth) attempt to clear the fence.

Foxes are a bit of a problem, especially with our cat. There's quite a nice fox den that's been built by the far right hand corner of our fence. He/she lives there on a regular basis, and is rarely seen before dusk. There have been a couple of times, however, when I look out my bedroom windows to see what appears to be a really large, reddish dog slithering low to the ground along the fence line. Moving REALLY quickly, the "dog" then dives into the pile of leaves covering its "home". I can always tell when the fox is out a lot at night: our cat, Norma Jean, will be found the next morning on the very top shelf in our garage, whimpering and whining more than usual. For a few years, we tried to have an agency 'relocate' the fox for us to an actual farm, with no luck. Our options were to either have the fox trapped and killed (which is apparently legal in New Jersey during a short window of time annually), or to do away with traps and just call the agency when the fox appears, so that they can immediately (ha!) come out to catch it. The fox is still living with us, I'm guessing quite happily.

Other animals we've encountered are opossums, which to me at first sight are really quite scary. They freeze in the light, much like a deer, with those enormous eyes wide opened, their body completely still. It's kind of like a standoff scene in a "The Hills Have Eyes Part 17" movie. We've had dozens of ducks in our pool, whose cheerful splashing around and chatter drives my husband slightly insane. (He does the pool maintenance.) This year, we've seen at least three dozen rabbits and bunnies, a number of whose small, cold corpses we would find by our garage door, courtesy of an ever-vigilant Norma Jean. (I had no idea that rabbits had such beautiful blue eyes until the morning I had to gently scoop up one's body, which was separate from its head, in our driveway.) Moles, squirrels and mice abound, a situation of which Norma Jean takes full advantage. Once, we watched a horse go tearing down the private lane that separates our property from that of the adjacent farm.

But I think the best of all was the summer morning when I came downstairs for coffee and saw - a collection of sheep, about eight of them, with our yellow labrador, Lady Bell, sitting smack in the middle of the 'gang'. The sheep had apparently found a (large) hold in the fence, and set out for greener pastures (ours!) If you know anything about the nature of labs, you understand that they just love, love, love everything and anyone. Lady Belle was apparently overjoyed to find animals that were the same color as she (beige!), and somehow figured out that if she were just quiet enough, they might be accepting of a 'newcomer'. The group of sheet, with Lady Belle proudly sitting right in the middle, tag wagging about 140 miles per minute, stayed there for about ten minutes before a human (me) broke up the fun. I wish that I'd been astute enough to have taken a photo: it was a once in a lifetime scene! I honestly believe that Lady Belle, who has now gone up to that Big Kennel in the Sky, never quite forgave me for breaking up the party.

Were you expecting me to mention black bears in this article? The bears aren't a problem in southern Jersey; bears are quite intelligent animals, after all. They hang out in Northern New Jersey, where all the Tony Sopranos of the state/world live, and where bundles of cold, hard cash - not trash - is kept in those big, green garbage bins!