If we were any more on the edge of town, we'd have to plow the living room. From our yard, you can throw a stone into the massive, rolling cornfield to the south, and all you have to do to see an even bigger field is walk out the front door and look west. At the east end of our street, there's a small pond that's about 1/2 water, 1/4 reeds, 1/8 mud, and 1/8 trash right now; the association is getting together in a week or two to clean it up. The number of bird species you can see out any window must number in the teens, including aggressive starlings, outsized robins, darting chipping sparrows and chickadees, deafening killdeer, whispering mourning doves (which Julia charmingly calls "afternoon doves" and "night doves," depending on the time of day), quarrely red-winged blackbirds, the reddest cardinals I've ever seen, and the occasional hawk or eagle soaring over those cornfields.
There are some mysterious fauna afoot, too. In the pond, for instance, we sometimes see some sort of swimming mammal that's too sleek to be a beaver (and doesn't slap its tail), but far too large to be a weasel or fisher. It might be an otter, but otters are social and we haven't (yet) seen others. I'm putting my money on it being a muskrat, which are common to fresh water throughout Minnesota but which also built domed houses, which I haven't yet found.
While I solve that mystery, I'll be cleaning up the piles of shit left on the patio by some mysterious nocturnal creature. I first thought it was a dog, based on the kind and quantity of the poop, but yesterday's leavings were very un-doglike, and, like their precedents, left in a cramped corner of the patio - hardly a spot where any but the smallest dog would go to go. I need one of those motion-operated flash cameras that biologists use to spot, like, pumas and wolves. Or else a powerful flashlight and three cans of Red Bull: anti-scat all-nighter!