Raccoons in the trash, owls in the trees, a bat in the house. These guides cover who’s really a risk, who’s just misunderstood, and what to do when a wild animal turns up in your yard.
A small bird has to get through a long winter night without eating, and its body loses heat faster than a big bird’s does. Where it sleeps matters a lot. A roost box is a birdhouse built for that job.…
A bird can survive a night of subfreezing temperatures, but it still needs water the next morning. That’s a problem when every puddle, birdbath, and shallow stream in the neighborhood has frozen solid. A shallow bowl of fresh water is…
Arkansas lets residents keep up to six qualifying hand-caught wild animals per household, including opossums, subject to additional rules. That’s the actual law, and it’s also a terrible idea. The reasons have much more to do with biology than with…
Raccoons leave when your yard stops paying them. Find what they’re eating and where they’re getting in, take both away, and most of them move on without a trap, a spray, or a fight. The popular alternatives range from short-lived…
Owls do eat snakes, and the more interesting question is how they manage it, particularly with venomous species, where the obvious follow-up is whether a rattlesnake or copperhead poses any real danger to a bird hunting it from above. The…
Owls aren’t out to get you. They can hurt you, though, if you walk under the wrong tree at the wrong time of year. Both things are true. Real attacks are rare, and nearly all of them come from a…
Wait, is it possum or opossum? Both are correct. Which one applies depends entirely on which animal you’re talking about, and most people in North America are casually using the wrong one without knowing it. The animal most Americans encounter…
Raccoons have plenty of natural predators. Coyotes, great horned owls, bobcats, red-tailed hawks, and in Florida even alligators all take raccoons regularly. The reason your neighborhood raccoon population doesn’t seem affected by any of this is simpler than it might…
Before anything else: which sparrow are you dealing with? If the answer is house sparrows, the chunky, aggressive, brown-streaked birds that showed up from England in the 1850s and have been taking over nest boxes ever since, you have real…
Crows eat eggs, nestlings, and given the opportunity, they’ll eat adult birds too, though that’s considerably rarer. If you’ve watched a crow raid a robin’s nest and felt a spike of alarm about the songbirds in your yard, that reaction…
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