We love our new home. Our property backs onto open space, and so we always have the potential for visitors of the wildlife variety.
This morning, I woke up at oh-dark-thirty, like I always do, and looked out our bedroom window. In the pre-dawn darkness, I saw an inch of new snow in our backyard, and large footprints crisscrossing the snow.
At first I was concerned about human intruders, but upon closer inspection, still in the dark, I could see that the footprints didn't have the heel strike characteristic of a human footprint, with or without shoes. Old Boy Scout here, you know.
In addition, the footprints were in a straight line. Human footprints are almost always offset from a straight line - you know, left right left right - especially if the human is running around in a strange backyard in the middle of the night.
Cats walk in a straight line. Big cats leave big footprints in a straight line. I was excited for the sun to come up, so that I could verify that we had indeed had mountain lions in our yard last night.
As the sun came up, I saw that each footprint was composed of four tiny paw prints. We had bunny rabbits in our yard last night, giggling with leporine glee as they ran around our yard pretending to be mountain lions.
 |
| Bunny lion tracks. |
