Close Encounters of the Finned, Feathered, and Furry Kind - or - The World Is My Zoo

Though I've never lived more than 30 minutes from the nearest Cineplex, I've always been fascinated with wildlife. We interact so little with these other creatures on Planet Earth that they may as well be alien species - beautiful, mysterious, and living in whole societies of their own of which I will never be a part.

This realization strikes me each morning as I drive my children to school past a large field at the commuter airport near our home. The periphery of the property is marked by a high fence and on the posts of the fence we often see hawks scanning the meadow for rodents. On one occasion while I sat in my car watching such a hawk, I experienced the thrill of the hunt vicariously when, all in one motion it seemed, he swooped down, caught a vole in his clenches, then soared into a high tree.

At least once a week in this same field we see a fox or a pair of foxes wandering in search of other unsuspecting rodents. In winter the foxes are easier to see because they are red dragging bushy tails behind them on the crust of the snow, but we see them in summertime, too, plodding along in search of food. I learned in elementary school picture books that foxes are sly and in high school ecology class that, though they are frequently city dwellers, people rarely see them. These foxes have an added level of security due to the airport fence, which seems to alleviate their concerns about human beings like me. They tolerate the paparazzi while they do what they have to do to survive.

On three occasions we've seen eagles in our neighborhood: one roosting on a post, one sitting in a pear tree that seemed only slightly larger than he was, and one soaring just above the rooftops. Hawks, eagles, and foxes, one very large rat and countless small mice - these are the wild animals who have visited our neighborhood.

But despite the fact that I am a city dweller (or, more specifically, a suburb dweller), I have had the random pleasure of seeing many creatures in their natural habitats (i.e., outside of zoos): a wolf, a handful of black bears, a smaller number of grizzly bears, several moose, herds of deer and elk, an occasional armadillo, porcupine, opossum, or raccoon, flocks of geese and pelicans, a pod of orca whales, a sea otter, and several sea lions. Seeing an animal in nature inspires wonder: What do they do when we aren't watching them? Where do they rest? How do they communicate with others of their kind? Ultimately, how do they survive?

Most wild animals are like unicorns: we hear they exist or have existed, but we do not expect to see them with our own eyes. In nature we listen and we look and sometimes our piqued senses are rewarded with a fleeting vision of something we have heard about only in stories or on Animal Planet -- There it is! It really does exist!

Outside of these unpredictable sightings, animals exist for most of us only in zoos and in fairytales.