In article , Janet Baraclough
wrote:

The message
from "David Hill" contains these
words:

I hate to think what would happen here, we have Foxes and badgers as well as
a couple of feral cats prowling the place at night.
Don't like the idea of providing a snack for them.

Nah, why would they attack something larger than themselves?

I once found a live frog in my sleeping bag, which was pretty horrible
and evinced mighty screams until I realised that's all it was; and more
recently a dead rabbit under my kip in the morning. It certainly wasn't
there at bedtime so possibly it snuggled up in the night, mistaking me
for St. Francis, and I rolled on the poor little bugger in my sleep and
suffocated it.

Janet.

I used to camp out a lot when I was doing herpetological studies and it
was very rough camping since we couldn't pack much into the off-the-trail
places we investigated. But in my old age I don't care for it, and my last
couple camp-outs were wussy ones with even electrical hookups. As it turns
out, if we'd slept out in the garden last night as Granny Artemis wanted,
we'd've gotten caught in a rain storm, which I quite loved listening to
from our bedroom, happy the garden was being blessed by a hard rain & that
I was not sleeping out in it. It might have been fun to actually catch and
frighten the racoon, though, who visited again last night, knocked over
the statue in the fountain, and dug up some fragile epimediums.

But I remember one camp-out long ago when in the middle of the night I was
awakened by a very loud THUMP right at the side of my head. I opened my
eyes and was staring into the enormous eyes of a flying squirrel. It
panted and gazed at me motionlessly, until I rather expected it might let
me touch it, though of course when my shoulder moved it took off up a
tree. It was a marvelous little encounter. If it had landed eight inches
closer it would've been smack dab on my face.

Before our visitor left us yesterday, we went for a woodland walk, and
came around a corner to find ourselves within five or six feet of a deer,
some of which are semi-tame around here. Even though our visitor's farm in
southern Idaho is on the route of a large band of elk, such random
encounters with wildlife are still nothing she's jaded by, and she was
quite as thrilled as was I. We stood as still as we could, and the deer
nonchallantly left the path, heading toward the sound of a second deer we
couldn't see but which was certainly not making any effort to be quiet. So
while I may have missed out on a chance to have the racoon climb over my
sleeping bag on its way to our tiny pond last night, I'm not feeling all
that deprived of wildlife encounters.

-paghat the ratgirl

--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
See the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com/