Living with urban wildlife can be a blessing or a curse — sometimes both. Where I live in Loveland, we seem to be “blessed” with a number of resident wild critters ranging from songbirds and game birds to raptors, rabbits, foxes, coyotes and those rascally raccoons.

Deer, elk and the occasional bear have made sporadic appearances in town, but rabbits, coons and foxes seem to have taken up permanent residence in almost every neighborhood in recent years. A week ago, I watched a red fox casually stroll past the entrance to the King Soopers supermarket in the Orchards Shopping Center, then stop in front of Baskin-Robbins to pick up a snack of some sort from the sidewalk. (A bit of ice cream cone wafer perhaps?) I stopped my car to watch him not 15 feet away and thought for sure he’d bolt, but he didn’t seem the least bit concerned. He kept his eye on me, wolfed down his snack and then leisurely wandered off around the corner going north toward Dry Creek.

A friend of ours sent us photos of a bobcat that was hanging around her yard near Namaqua Park for several weeks last summer. We can hear coyotes from our house almost nightly. A pair of foxes has been hanging around our neighborhood for the last three years. I have photos of one sleeping under our pine tree and of another eating a cottontail rabbit it caught on our front lawn. I shot several photos of the fox before it became annoyed, picked up its lunch and moved across the yard to finish it. I suspect the backyard bunny population attracts the foxes; that, and the fact that they’re safer in town than they are out in the fields where the coyotes would most definitely kill them.
None of this would be particularly unusual if we lived in a country setting, but we’re talking city subdivisions — grocery stores, gas stations, school buildings, cars, trucks and people everywhere you look.

My wife and I think the rabbits are cute, the foxes think they’re delicious and our neighbor across the street thinks they’re evil. He has his reasons, of course. He toils all summer raising what we called a “victory garden” when I was a kid: beans, squash, carrots, cabbages, broccoli, brussels sprouts,  cauliflower, peppers and a half dozen varieties of tomatoes, not to mention asparagus, cutting flowers and other assorted ornamentals — all of which the rabbits find most delectable.

We don’t mind the foxes, birds and rabbits, but the raccoons have become abominable. They are belligerent, aggressive and incredibly destructive. When we first moved here 20 years ago, they were raiding our apple, plum and peach trees. We cut the trees down, but the coons quickly turned their attention to our little “frog pond,” or water feature as they are now called. They would demolish it on an almost weekly basis. I live trapped and relocated six of them one summer (not a pleasant task, by the way) to no avail. They returned in force to raise havoc with our garden and bird feeders. They established a “community coon toilet” beneath a juniper thicket behind the house and dug holes under our backyard shed for roosting. We hoisted the bird feeders high  on a steel pole, barricaded the perimeter of the shed with bricks, live trapped four more of them and took them for a long ride to the mountains.

We take our feeders in at night to discourage them, but it’s all for naught. They are persistent, creative critters, and they’ve returned again. Now they dig in the lawns at night for worms and grubs and whatever else it is they root for in lawns. They continue to scratch up errant seed from beneath the feeder stations and take baths in our little frog pond. No matter what we do, they won’t go away.

I caught a big boar coon in the cage-trap earlier this summer and planned to release him the next morning. But just before I retired for the night, four other raccoons converged on the trap and began crawling over it, pulling at it and trying to figure out how to get their friend out, all the while making that strange chittering noise coons make. For an hour before turning in for the night, I watched them puzzle with that thing, and when I awoke the next morning they had figured out how to release their trapped friend.

I caught another one this week about 11 p.m. — too late to take him for a ride to the country. Doggone if he, too, didn’t escape from the trap before morning.
Now I’m considering erecting some signs that say, “NO COONS ALLOWED.” I’m thinking if they’re smart enough to get out of a steel cage-trap, they might be smart enough to read, too.