Wild Kingdom Right Here on Gobbler's Knob

As a child, every Sunday, my brother, sisters and I eagerly gathered around our tv to watch "Wild Kingdom" with Marlin Perkins telling us of some exotic, fierce animal in a far away land and what they did to survive.  Sometimes, it was brutal and it was always exciting.  Well that wild kingdom is no longer in a faraway land for me.  It's in my own backyard.  We have worked for 8.5 years to make our little piece of heaven a safe haven for wildlife by building brush piles and planting native plants that provide food, habitat and cover for them. 

Rabbits are drawn to the sweet crimson clover that blossoms during the spring and they sometimes forget how exposed they are while munching on the beautiful flowers.

Quail, turkey, a wide variety of other birds, reptiles (snakes, turtles, etc.), skunks, rabbits, squirrels, and possums, just to name a few, enjoy life here with us on Gobbler's Knob.  That variety of wildlife also brings in the inevitable predators - owls, hawks, coyotes and foxes - that prey upon them and I love them as much as I love the wildlife. 

A leucistic Northern Harrier snags a mole for his lunch.

The sheer rawness of wild animals hunting, stalking, chasing, creeping about and finally pouncing upon their prey is exhilarating, breathtaking and exciting to me.  But we don't make it easy for the predators.  We have given the prey ample opportunity for escape and avoidance.  They have plenty of brush piles to escape into, lots of natural cover in which they can camouflage themselves and their survival is totally dependent on how or whether they learn to use those tools to their advantage.  It's not just survival of the fittest, it's also survival of the smartest.

A Red-Shouldered Hawk waits patiently as it scans the field for signs of movement indicating a tasty morsel is about to make a fatal error.

Five weeks ago, I decided to deploy my game cameras around the property so I could catch a glimpse into their nightly activities.  The results have been more rewarding than what I could have hoped for.
These stealthy, beautiful creatures of the night help control our voles, moles, snakes, mice, free-roaming cats, ground hogs (which can quickly become a nuisance and very destructive to pond banks in Missouri), and many other animals here.  Yes, they eat the quail, turkey and our other desirables too, but I can accept a native predator doing its thing in order to survive. 
I always get excited when I see the late night and early morning timestamps on the cards, because I know I'm about to see a visitor that I would have never known about, without the use of these cameras. 

I find it very interesting that some of our 4-legged predators like to travel the same paths around our property which we have carved with our 4-wheelers.  In the first video below, a coyote walks across the trail, moving away from one of the brush piles that has a deep hole burrowed out beneath it.  I would love to know what is or what was living under there at one time and if the coyote caught whatever it was.

Interestingly, on the same night within 15 minutes, on the north trail, a fox can be seen sniffing around.  Ironically, I have another video of Nikki and Bob walking this same trail the next day and Nikki's hackles on her back are standing up.  She knew that he / she had been there the night before - she always seems to know.

And what looks to be the same fox comes through again the next night.

Today, it is 18 degrees with snow flurries and it is supposed to get colder this week.  I've cleared the cards and made sure the batteries are good on the game cameras.  I'll check them again in a few days to see what our friends have been up to.  Yeah, we're digging life here on Gobbler's Knob, bringing the Wild Kingdom right up to our back door steps.