It’s been noted that I’ve been featuring an awful lot of cuddly animals on Greater Grafton lately and, you know, I’d hate for this to devolve into the “OMG! Wicked! Cute! Animals!” blog.
So in keeping with that, I will point out this video, taken by Ken Webb of the Grafton Land Trust on the Martha Deering Property on Potter Hill Road, using a motion sensor camera:
Why is that a… coyote? Note the lack of Acme products in the shot, which has me all confused because I spent my childhood convinced that coyotes used explosives to catch their prey not, say, their teeth and sheer brute muscular force. Anyway.
And what, pray tell, is Mr. Coyote hunting? You’ll have to check out the Grafton Land Trust’s Martha Deering Property page, which has footage of some of the other wild critters who roam our fair town.
Greater Grafton 
Got any Acme tornado pellets? Add a drop of water and… Auntie Em! Uncle Henry!!!
I, for one, think coyotes are extremely cute.
Until they eat your cat.
But you may recall I have a soft spot for animals that hunt. My cat growing up, Ba-ba, all fuzzy and white? Stone-cold killer. You had to respect how bad-ass he was. I’d bet on him to take on the hawk that hunts our neighborhood, and that’s one tough bird.
We had one of those cute fuzzy and white cats when I was growing up. Bad-ass is an understatement – we had daily presents of mangled animals on our door step. Rabiits, squirrels, baby raccoons, and of course the usual rodents and birds. The most amazing thing was that she lived well into her late teens, lost most of her teeth and still hunted. I mean – what did she do, gum these poor animals to death?
My cat lived to be almost 20 and was in perfect health up until that last year, when we believe he had a stroke. The summer he died, my brother found a field mouse on our lawn mower. We brought our then nearly blind cat over to the mower and he immediately went to work tracking the thing — sure, he would crash into objects, but he hunted that mouse down!
I’m convinced I did well in biology because I was already used to seeing inner bits and pieces of animals from what he left on our doorstep every day. For my 16th birthday, he brought a half-dead mouse into my bed and proceeded to make it all-dead. I think he was trying to show me how to do it for myself.
After he died, our neighbor, who had spent nearly 20 years chasing him out of her gardens, complained that her yard was being overrun by vermin. Of course it was — what did she think was getting rid of all the mice, moles, rabbits and voles over the years?