Being nature lovers, we are fortunate to have a backyard that entertains us with an array of creatures. Throughout the year, we watched a mother deer and her twin fawns travel, and eat, their way across our yard, dazzling us from their first spring days on feeble legs, to their effortless jumps over shrubs, fences and our little creek, throughout the summer and fall. Several times a week, our lawn would be graced with their presence, a moment that never lost its thrill.
Many other animals visit or live near our home, located on a forested watershed: weasels, foxes, owls, cranes, groundhogs, opossums, muskrats, rabbits, moles, hawks, chipmunks, and squirrels.
Highlights of our animal encounters include sitting on our steps watching a brood of baby raccoons cross our path, until their mother joined the group and we quickly rid ourselves. Each summer, the mother ducks will often let us get close enough to count the ducklings. Not long after we moved in, we found a gigantic walking stick bug on our deck, and last summer, my daughter noticed a walking stick no bigger than a fingernail. On our butterfly weed plants, three cycles of caterpillars transformed themselves into monarch butterflies, and we wake up to discover elaborate webs strung across our gardens overnight, catching the sun in the dew drops. We marvel at the colour and song of dozens of varieties of birds, including the real Woody Woodpecker, a pileated woodpecker, a prehistoric-looking bird larger than a crow. All this, on just under one acre of land in the middle of our town.
In the summer, there’s another animal you will find in this outdoor menagerie: a bearded dragon.
Riddick, our 3 year old orange bearded dragon, has back legs like a frog, spikes like a dinosaur, and patterned scales like a snake without its slickness. He’s not cuddly, but he is fascinating.
Although his first few weeks in our home were touch and go, he pulled through and has been roaming around with us every since. Literally. He has a terrarium to keep him warm and safe during the night, but his mornings start under a heat lamp on our main floor. From there, he is free to wander; however, you can usually find him sitting near the sidelight windows of the front door catching the early morning sun on his back. In the late afternoon, he will be pacing in front of the sixteen foot sliding glass doors on the opposite side of the house trying to figure out how to get onto the sunny deck.
The lifestyle of a bearded dragon is easily incorporated into a family life. He ate crickets when he first joined us but it was apparent that he abhorred having insects crawl on him, even though he got the ultimate revenge in the end, so now he sustains himself on superworms and bok choy with an occasional strawberry treat. We can leave him in his terrarium when we are away from home, and in an emergency, he could probably be left without food for days at a time; being a resilient and instinctive creature. We don’t worry about him scratching our furniture or biting the neighbours, and apart from the occasional shedding of scales, he doesn’t need to be groomed.
As mentioned, his favourite place to bask in summer is on a knarly branch perched on our lawn, close to the house, where we watch over him. He does scamper but his self-defense mechanism for avoiding danger is to stay still, which he does very well.
The most unusual part of living with our bearded dragon is the brumation period, similar to hibernation. Our baby bearded dragon had been with us only six months when he stopped eating and withdrew into the cold, dark edges of his terrarium. I nursed him through with organic baby food, fed through an eye-dropper, every other day. As a cold-blooded animal, he needed to be warmed up first, then I would give him a lukewarm bath to clean the food off his face. I was a mess when I thought he was going to die a week after we brought him home—I wasn’t going to let that happen again.
One day, four months after it began, I went to check on him, and he was basking under his heat lamp as if nothing was wrong. When this whole process repeated itself the following year, after I had read extensively about this behaviour, I was much less concerned and let him get his rest. He finished his most recent brumation last December, just in time to enjoy climbing our Christmas tree.
Keep your cats and dogs; I take pleasure in the carefree animals of our backyard, and would rather have a lizard living in my house than any other pet.
