Figure 1 – Eastern cottontail, Sudbury, MA, (c) DE Wolf 2016.

I ran into the fellow in Figure 1, my next-door neighbor, in my back yard yesterday evening. He is an Eastern Cottontail (Sylvilagus floridanus), and it makes one wonder. The wild is really at our doorsteps. But more significantly, there has been a family of cottontails and a family of woodchucks living in my backyard as long as we have been here.

Whose backyard is it really? I read that back in the nineteenth century the site of my home was the location of a wheelwright’s shop and home – a Mr. Taylor, I believe. I suspect that the forebears of these fur-bearers were living here then. They would have been disturbed as human houses were torn down and new ones constructed. But they stayed on.

Every spring each year, my wife and I plant large pots which we locate at the end of the driveway. We carefully water them, and the next morning we find them all torn up with the little plantings strewn about the lawn. It only happens the one time each summer, as if it were a little protest meant to remind me of just who was here first.

So anyway, here is a portrait of my next-door neighbor. It seems sadly likely that at the time of King Philip’s War one of his distant ancestors was roasted for some Puritan’s dinner – we cannot say for sure.

Canon T2i with EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM lens at 330 mm, ISO 1600, Aperture Priority AE Mode, 1/250th sec at f/7.1 with no exposure compensation.