My backyard is an animal love shack.
Some explanation before we get to all the copulatin’ critters: I live at the northern end of the San Fernando Valley just above L.A., in the dully-named North Hills. We really are in the foothills here, with streets that go up and down like roller coaster climbs and drops. My house is in a secluded cul-de-sac, bordered by a wash on one side. The combination of cul-de-sac, wash, and hill makes for a weirdly-shaped backyard, which is not only configured like some Lovecraftian cosmic trapezoid, but is itself hilly—it drops about four feet down the middle.
It’s still a surprisingly big yard; before we moved in (2015), the previous owners had paved over the whole lower part and dared to call it a “sports court.” We jackhammered most of that shit out (yeah, we even did it ourselves, feeling spectacularly butch), leaving just enough for an outdoor office (we refer to it as the Dacha, since we figure we’re already sort of living under Vladimir Putin). I enjoy gardening, so we put a raised bed on the upper level, outlined with bricks; we realized only after we’d built it that it bore a striking resemblance to an erect dick. Maybe it adds more fertility to the soil.
For the first few years after we moved in, our neighbor hadn’t fenced his yards, so his front yard spilled into his backyard spilled right into the wash twenty feet below. His yards became a highway for everything from a three-legged coyote to humans who I’d like to imagine were using that on-ramp to commute to their secret cabalistic orgies.
Then our neighbor fenced his yard. The maimed coyote and cultists disappeared. But something changed in our backyard.
The occasional opossum or lizard or rat was joined by new arrivals. Feral cats started showing up. Last year, in 2024, I heard a tiny cry out back one morning and followed it to find a fist-sized black kitten, so young it still had those glassy blue eyes, tangled up in a grape trellis. I cut the little thing free, released it…and watched it re-join its THREE siblings. Yes, we had a litter of four black kittens and their mama living behind the Dacha.
The love fest had begun.
I spent most of 2024 dealing with those kittens—we kept two, Spooky and Sammy, adopted the other two to friends, and got all of them (including Mom) spayed or neutered. Trapping the kittens was…ummm…an adventure, because sometime within the previous year a family of raccoons had moved into the ‘hood. Five trash pandas. One night I caught three in one live-trap. I got adept at cleaning out those traps after raccoons crapped in ‘em.
The old feral cats vanished. Yay, I thought, because that was a shit-ton (almost literally) of work.
But, this year, more showed up.
Our kittens’ dad, a big tough guy we simply called DadCat, was still around and hadn’t yet been trapped and neutered, but now there was a new female (we’ve named her Florrie, in honor of my favorite 19th-century medium, the seductive Florence Cook) AND another male (Butterscotch, because of his coloring). Before long, I could look outside my backdoor and see DadCat with his new girl going at it.
Oh, great…more kittens.
Yep, a new litter (of just two) arrived in the spring…but Butterscotch was plainly the dad, because one kitten looked just like him (the other looked like Florrie). So Florrie was boinking both DadCat and Butterscotch.
One kitten sadly vanished, but we got the rest trapped, spayed, adopted, and neutered. Butterscotch and Florrie seem to be permanent residents now.
But there were still those frisky masked bandits…
I keep a solar-charged security camera in the backyard because I like seeing whose coming (umm, yeah) and going back there. We now have opossums, cats, raccoons and skunks visiting on a regular basis.
One raccoon in particular is a horny little fucker. We caught him on camera one night humping a wooden beam that divides up part of the raised bed. Then we caught him humping another raccoon (yes, I shared that video on social media, even though it’s totally NSFW).
So far we haven’t captured any fucking skunks on camera, but I’m sure that’s next. Hopefully the humans will keep their orgies (and resulting spawn) confined to the wash.