I’ve had two amazing surprises within the past week that, unfortunately, I wasn’t able to capture with my camera.  Both were visitors to our backyard.

The first was… a fox!  He visited Thursday morning at 10:00am, and he it stayed for about five minutes, giving me a lot of time to watch what it was up to.  When it first caught my attention, walking along the fence, I assumed it was a cat.  Then I realized it was much larger than a cat.  The fox found a way to jump down in to the yard and proceeded to sniff around the entire perimeter of the yard.  Then it sniffed around our entire deck area.  The fox seemed to be trying to find a way to get under the deck.  My favorite part was when the fox walked right up to the sliding glass window where I was standing not two feet away (on the other side of the glass).  It gave me an excellent opportunity to see how beautiful he (she?) was.  I also enjoyed watching how the birds reacted to the intruder.  The chickadee watched the fox closely from the oak tree, excitedly yelling “chick-a-dee-dee” over and over and over until he left the area.  Two scrub jays were also keeping a close eye on the fox.  All other birds fled.  The fox left the yard by climbing up one of the fence poles in the same was the squirrels do, and walked off down the fence to visit another yard.  I was able to follow his movements for a while by the behavior of the birds.

The second surprise visitor this week was… a hawk.  It attacked the bird feeder.  Well, it tried to capture a bird at the feeder, but I don’t think it was successful.  I heard the attack.  It sounded as if the bird feeder had been knocked over, so I ran over to see what happened.  I assumed it was a squirrel.  But sitting on the fence was a hawk!  It didn’t seem to have caught anything.  My movement frightened it, and it instantly flew off.

Since I wasn’t able to capture either of these visitors with my camera, my entry for the photo challenge this week will have to be about all the surprises hidden under our Christmas tree.  My five-year-old is so excited, he’s about to explode.

Happy holidays, everyone!

Weekly Photo Challenge:  Surprise