Animals around the neighborhood.

Mr. Nivose says: Having been here in Fort Collins for about 6 months I've been surprised by the animals around. Ft. Collins is a fairly dense urban center. Slow traffic, people, more people when college is in session.
They've done some effort to maintain parks and natural areas. And, given the wacky water laws in Colorado it's best that they did or there would be no fishing.
Our apartment is in a good sized complex of 5 buildings with 8 units in each building. We are on a fairly large road, though north and west enough from the center of the city to minimize traffic.
Just to our south, across the road, is fair sized park like Cemetery. Beyond that is a nine hole golf course and just east of that is a pond and park. The pond-park is a decent walk from our house, but still likely contributes to the lack of housing and support for wild animals in our area.
Abutting our property to the north is a cow range of some type. It seems that the herd is a bit sparse for the amount of land, but I don't really know about these things. And to our west is a house that used to be a goat farm. Signs of goats are long gone, other than the large field behind the house which we can see from our porch.

All of this open/unused/quite space means that the deer in the area come through often enough. I've barely seen them this winter, but through the spring and fall we saw a fairly decent herd often, and there was a mother with two young that we saw almost daily:See more pictures of the deer by clicking here.
In the second picture in that album it's dark and you can barely make out the tree line and two sets of glowing deer eyes. The last picture is one of the few of a male deer I was able to get. His antlers are of a good size. He's laying down in the goat property next to a fence. Most of the pictures are of the mother, or the two young that visited us the most. The property has some apple and pear trees, and the deer were quite fond of them. They are not the deer I am used to in NH, I don't know, but due to their funny ears am assuming they are mule deer.

At the north edge of property is a fence that separates us from the cow property. The deer have no trouble jumping this. Beyond it is a small grove of trees, then a large irrigation ditch. After the ditch is the beginning of the cow pasture. Most of the time they are quite a distance out in the field. However, a few times this summer they came across the ditch and hung out in the trees. I have no idea why this is (shade maybe), but it made it possible to take pictures of them that were not just distant specs:

See the rest of the cow pictures by clicking here.
You can see how they were right up to the fence. And in some pictures you can get an idea of the grove and where the ditch is. Watching cows try to cross the ditch can be kind of funny. They are not especially nimble.
Earlier this winter I was getting the mail. It had recently snowed, but it was a warm day. In one of the piles of snow near the mail box I saw a bee:
I found it to be fairly interesting. Snow and bees are not something I usually see together.

There are a number of animals that we have been unable to catch in pictures so far. A branch of the irrigation ditch that the cows use cuts south through one of our west end neighbors property and runs along the cemetery into the golf course. It includes many crayfish, and sometimes little fry or minnows. It drys up sometimes too, but when it's muddy it has prints of most of the animals that live around. There is one or more fox that seems to live in the cemetery but crosses our parking lot to hunt in the goat field. We also see bats in the goat field and the cemetery.
A large tree about 20 feet from our porch houses a family of raccoons. I didn't see them when they are small - though little raccoons are one of the cutest things in the world- but I have seen them full grown investigating the pumpkin remains in the dumpster.
I have an eye for cats of course. I've seen a few just once. But two I see often belong in another building in our complex. They live upstairs from each other and their owners leave their windows open for the cats to come and go. Keep in mind Colorado has little in the way of mosquitoes. The downstairs one is all black - sleek and cute. The upstairs one is also all black, but he's quite fluffy. His name is Sphere - I know, I picked him up once and that's what his collar read. He's a little shy, but cats like me pretty well.

Living in trees in the cemetery are a handful of owls. We are uncertain if it is a mother and about 3 nearly grown young. Or if it is a bunch of adults living separately. This spring we might have a better idea if we find some of them are moved on. They also hunt in the goat field, but the cemetery itself seems to provide some small mice or moles or some such.


Owls are not the easiest things to take pictures of with conventional cameras, but you can see the rest of the pictures by clicking here.
The owls do perch on the headstones at dusk a lot. If this is watching for signs of rodents and small birds. Or just getting their head straight before hunting, I can't say. One time we were coming up on one and it took off. From a distance we could see a small rock or something on the gravestone. My first thought was that it was an owl pellet. And it actually turned out to be one. You can see it in the last few pictures in the album.
The owls can be tough to spot in some of the pictures. It's easier once you know they are there, but that doesn't help terribly does it?

I did see a toad once, near our porch steps. But that's about it for amphibians. Despite all the irrigation ditch, there's not a lot of frog around here. We saw some baby snakes at a trail up the road, but no awesome lizards or tarantulas. Might have to venture to the even dryer areas for that. Though, this summer we had a couple very large praying mantises around. Which I did not see regularly in NH.

-Mr. Nivose

Mrs. Nivose says: It's not uncommon for me to run into deer in the parking lot as I leave in the mornings. I see them less often now that it is winter though. Sometimes there are 6 or 7 deer passing through. Some have antlers! The apartment complex we live in has several fruit trees around the buildings, a big field to the north and west, and a cemetery to the south. In addition there is an irrigation ditch running through the cemetery and another through the field, so there is plenty for the deer to eat and drink. They seem to like the apples quite well. I would say that the deer aren't too afraid of us. They'll keep eating if we're watching from the porch. They aren't tame though and will run away if we get too close.

When I first moved in here (a couple of months before Peter got here) there were two baby deer. One of the neighbors said they were twins. They were very, very cute and had still had a few spots. One evening I had been out for a walk and saw the mama deer and one of the babies over in the cemetery. As I approached the apartment, I heard a noise that sounded like a mewing cat. It turned out the other baby deer had gotten separated from its mama and was crying. I had never heard a deer say anything before, so this was very interesting. It thought about coming over to see me, but in the end was too scared. I tried to tell it where its mama and sibling were, but I don't speak deer very well. They all caught up with each other eventually.

The little deer are much bigger now. I can't tell them apart from the rest of the herd.
I've also seen the deer play with the fox that lives in the field. They looked like they were playing tag.
I last saw the deer about the beginning of January. There were 3 or 4 in the field having breakfast.

The field to the north is intended for cattle grazing. A few times this past summer, the cows crossed the irrigation ditch and came right up to the fence bordering their field and our parking lot. Up close, these were certainly not the groomed cows of the stock show, but regular cows with poop on their back ends and flies buzzing all over them. I got up close to take some of the pictures. Some of the cows were camera shy and moved away, others didn't care. They were so very cow like. Cows have this look on their faces that make it look like they're incapable of processing any information beyond whether or not what they are seeing is grass. It's almost like I can look into their eyes and see the molecules moving between the neurons in their brains. Cows just look like they think slow.

Still, having a field full of cows behind the apartment is a lot more interesting than just having more buildings behind the apartment.

I mentioned earlier that there's a cemetery across the street to the south. It's full of big trees and is quite park like, and during the growing months, water flows through the irrigation canal. We talk walks through the cemetery fairly often. We usually see raccoon and deer prints in the mud along the canal, and at night we sometimes go shine flashlights at the crayfish. But we don't have pictures of those things. We do have pictures of one of the owls. I once saw four owls in the cemetery on the same evening, but usually we just see one or two. As best as I can tell they're great horned owls.

The owls perch on the tall headstones and in the trees waiting for little rodents. Sometimes the owls leave gifts of pellets on the headstones. We can usually get close enough to them to make out some of the markings on their bellies, but we can't get close enough for a really good picture. They're very quiet when they fly away and have a huge wingspan. Their eyes are big and round and their heads rotate to watch us watch them. It's really neat to live so close to these big owls.

We also had a raccoon family living in the cottonwood tree just outside our apartment. There were 4-5 babies this year and they were adorable! They'd follow their mama in a line, and climb into the fruit trees and make squeaky little noises. We haven't taken any pictures of them yet. Hopefully there will be more this year!

Ok, here's the wildlife roundup: Mysterious owls, adorable raccoons, playful fox, hungry deer, stupid cows, crayfish and various birds and bugs and bats we haven't gotten into yet. We'll stay on the lookout for more!

-Mrs. Nivose