My Summit County Colorado home is surrounded with wildlife (photos!)

Our house backs to forest service land and we have owned it for aobut 13 years.  Summit County is 80% public lands which doesn't leave much space for development.  As a result, it is almost impossible to find lots that are larger than 1/2 acre.  That is what we have, and we bought where we did because of the forest service land behind us.  We feel like we have five or ten acres, even if we don't.  An added benefit is the wildlife that we see. 

Two summers ago I watched fox babies (known as kits) as they played in a neighbor's driveway. It is a vacation home and the owners are not there very much. Last year I watched another fox family that went from two kits to one.  Their den was too much out in the open and I think a predator of some sort got one.  This season they are not using it.   We routinely have foxes run through our yard and are learning to recognize them by their markings.  I had a neighbor that used to feed them dog biscuits and they would come up on his deck, but feeding wildlife is not good for the animals.  It makes them dependent on you and if you move away, which he did, it is much harder for them to survive. 

Last fall we had a pair of moose in our back yard.  We got some good photos but the male was a little threatening and we  decided that getting closer was not a good idea. We watched from the safety of the house.  This spring we  had a young moose munching away on the new  grass in the side yard between my house and the neighbor.  I went outside not knowing he was there and was surprised by the neighbor who told me that he had been videotaping him.  My presence in the driveway didn't bother the moose at all and he just kept eating. 

There were a lot of Mule deer last summer and they kept my garden well trimmed.  (This is a moose, not a mule deer!) I have not seen any deer yet this spring.  We have heard mountain lion a couple of times in the middle of the night, (they sound like a woman screaming, and it is a bit unnerving) but I have yet to see one and don't care if I never do.   You seldom hear of mountain lion sightings and they are pretty good at being reclusive.  Needless to say, my cats are indoor cats and do not go outside except on asmall deck we have on the second floor of the house with no stairs down and no trees nearby.  We call it the kitty deck.

We frequently get racoons and had a whole family of them come up on our kitty deck one winter night and raid the bird feeders.  It freaked my cats out, as they were just a pane of glass away from each other. The racoons are pretty brazen and just ignored the cats spitting and hissing on the other side of the glass.   One thing we don't get a big variety of is birds, but I feed the ones that are brave enough to stay through our winters. 

We have seen bears a couple of times and sign of them several times.  I learned that you don't put bird feeders out in the summer as they will destroy them getting the sunflower seed.  My husband looked up one morning while watching a tv program on bears and saw a bear walking down our driveway, right outside the window!  This morning I awoke at 5am to noises that I figured were the racoons raiding the bird feeder (now bear proof).  I learned my lesson about bird feeders in the summer, but I have only ever seen bears in the fall, and I had just a few more sunflower seeds l wanted to get rid of so I put the bird feeder out one last time.  When I looked out the window to see the racoons this morning, what I saw was a huge bear!  We don't have grizzlies, but if I hadn't known that I would have sworn he was a grizzly.  My deck rail is 36" high and on all fours, he came just to the bottom of the top railing, so I estimated that he was about 30" tall at the shoulder.  When he stood up to get the feeder, had he been looking my way (I was about 10' away, looking out the kitchen window)  we would have been eyeball to eyeball and I am 5'5".  I ran around inside the house making sure all windows and doors were locked as I had a friend who ended up with a bear coming in her bedroom window, and they have been known to break into houses.  However, my "bear proof" feeder just meant that it took him a little longer to get into it and he was engrossed in licking up spilled sunflower seed.  He had broken off the pole the feeder was hanging from as he pulled it down.  I decided that I had to have some photos, but at 5:15 am, it is light enough outside to see the bear, but not to photograph him without flash.   I wasn't about to bring his attention to what was inside the house, namely me, so I tiptoed from window to patio door to window, trying to keep track of where he was.    The barbeque grill was also on the deck, and we had just grilled some meat a couple of days ago, but luckily we had done it in foil and he had no interest in the barbeque.  They love the grease in grills.

The bear finally cleaned up all the bird seed, sat down on the deck on his haunches for a bit, and then, as I moved to a different window to get a better view, just disappeared.  I never saw him again, and above is the only photo I got; bear slobber and an empty feeder, taken after the sun came up and I was absolutely sure he was gone.  It was an exciting start to a great day, and one I won't forget for a while.