My Neighbors, the Critters

That's right, the critters. No, I'm not talking about the neighbors up the road, but the ones who visit from the woods behind my house. I have a pretty big yard, and in the back it adjoins several hundred acres of woods. Now to someone like me, who enjoys sitting out there playing the banjo on a warm summer evening, that's a good thing. And the wildlife, those are the critters I'm talking about.
I do love the animals, so I try to take care of them in my own way. I have a lot of bird feeders, so especially in the wintertime they will have food. And of course there are squirrels, rabbits, raccoons, deer, and a special opossum that comes around at night. Every once in a while I'm even treated to 5 or 6 wild turkeys coming through the yard together.
Sometimes when I'm up early for an opening shift at work, it's just getting daylight, and from the kitchen window I can see the deer in the yard eating before they go to bed down. The squirrels are everywhere, and it seems they take a special kind of fondness to the bird feeders, but that's ok too.
I like to put out small bales of alfalfa for the rabbits in the back yard, they come up and enjoy that from what I can see, and if I drive home at night my lights will pass over them often. There's also a raccoon that comes up close to the back porch, especially around the area where I keep the grill, and I try to always have something out there for him.
But the opossum, well, one night I was in here on the computer and heard a scratching at the back door. Tanner went and put his head down to listen, and I got up and went there also, because I thought it was probably a cat that belongs to a neighbor through the woods. But when I opened the back door, here was the opossum sitting there. He didn't run away, just looked up as if to say "I'm hungry." So here I go to the fridge to see what I can find.
It's really an enjoyable thing for me to watch these animals that I call my neighbors. It gives me a great pleasure to be able to look out and see them enjoying what I leave for them, and I'm happy to see that they feel as much at home in my back yard as I do.