Urban Critters

We were driving home after dinner tonight when, a few blocks away from home, Scott suddenly said “What’s that flying over there?”

I looked up and saw a large pair of wings flapping slowly up ahead, at about the same height as a traffic light. It stopped and stood perched on an electric wire.

“I think it’s an owl!” Scott said.

We parked the car and walked right up to it for a closer look. There, at the corner of South Blvd. and Park Avenue – just ten blocks from the heart of Bank of America – the owl was enjoying a balmy night out.

It was the first time either one of us had seen an owl outside of captivity. It’s wild, and THAT’s wild.

We wondered if it was responsible for the disappearance of our possum.

For weeks, we had a possum that came everyday to our backyard parking lot to scavenge the leftover cat food that our neighbor Dave feeds twice daily to his adopted stray/feral cats. There were always leftovers, the possum had discovered, and the cats could care less.

He was not at all afraid of humans and would come as close as a couple of feet away from us to get to the food. Even after Scott shoos him away, he would come back within seconds to take a second bite out of the cat food bowls. (Yes, there are different bowls for different cats.) And he would go around to empty each bowl, climbing up a cinder block to reach one that was purposefully placed high to be out of his reach, then scour the ground for spillovers. Once I sat watching him for a long time. He would get so close that I could hear the crunching of the food pellets as he ate.

I half suspected that given a few more weeks, Dave would cave in and put out a new bowl for him.

But he hadn’t reappeared in the last couple of days. He was a small creature, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the owl, or one of the hawks we’ve seen in the area, finally got to it.

If that’s the case, I hope I don’t find any of its leftovers.