Backyard Wildlife

One of the cool things about being a naturalist at Dunes Learning Center is that you get to live in a national park, and with that comes a backyard with cool wildlife. 

When I first moved in at the beginning of June, the first thing I noticed was the blue jay that decided to fly from tree to tree around the house loudly proclaiming its presence. It wasn’t long after that when Hope (another naturalist that I live with) and I decided the resident blue jay should be named Gerald. It was at least a month until we determined that there were, in fact, multiple Geralds. 

We also have a variety of woodpeckers around the house. I see a lot of red-bellied, downy, and hairy woodpeckers pecking on the trees around the house. Woodpeckers are my favorite to take pictures of because they tend to work their way around a single tree for a while instead of flitting amongst the foliage like some birds do.

We get other birds too, including gray catbirds, yellow-rumped warblers, black-capped chickadees, and even the occasional owl, but we also get our fair share of mammals. Red squirrels hang out in the spruce tree by my window, rabbits hop through our driveway, and there was one night that we saw an opossum out the window. My favorite mammal that shows up outside our window though is the white-tailed deer. 

We only get deer in our yard occasionally, but when we do, there are usually three of them, one of which was clearly a fawn this summer. The deer are my favorite because they remind me of my family’s home in Southern Illinois, where we often have eight to ten deer every night bedded down in the field. Seeing white-tailed deer outside of my window gave me a sense of familiarity when I had just moved to a new place. 

Kate Valentine

Interpretive Naturalist Fellow