Your Animal Neighbors 
THE INTERESTING WILD LIFE WHICH MAY BE FOUND ABOUT THE COUNTRY PLACE- 
HABITS AND TRAITS OF ANIMALS WHOSE VERY PRESENCE IS OFTEN UNSUSPECTED 
by Ernest Harold Ba 
P hotographs by the Author 
I N order to get the greatest amount of enjoyment out of a home 
in the country, we must have some wild neighbors, and we 
must be more or less in touch with them. It is by no means nec¬ 
essary to this enjoyment that our wild 
neighbors be in evidence all the time, 
but we must know that they exist and 
that there is always at least the possi¬ 
bility of seeing them. For example, a 
wood in which deer are known to live, 
but in which we may not actually see 
one more than once in five years, has 
for us a charm which is never pos¬ 
sessed by a wood where there is no 
possibility of seeing a deer. 
The very uncertainty of the move¬ 
ments of our wild neighbors adds to 
our interest in them. A thousand 
times a year they give us bits of un¬ 
expected pleasure which we should 
not get at all if they conformed to “the 
best usages” of human society. One 
of my own wild 
neighbors at the d. —— 
present time is a 
white weasel or 
ermine. Long 
ago he appoint¬ 
ed himself Head Rat-catcher 
to our family, and made our 
home his headquarters, and 
there is always a saucer of 
evaporated milk waiting for 
him as evidence of our hos¬ 
pitality. Sometimes we do 
not see him for several days, 
when suddenly some evening 
we are thrilled to observe him 
perched on top of the book¬ 
case, watching us in silence, 
his eyes glowing like opals in 
the subdued light. Presently 
he will come down, nose rap¬ 
idly about until he finds his 
milk, and we see him lapping 
it just as a kitten might do. 
We look away for a moment, 
and when we look for him 
again he has gone, silently as 
he came, the empty saucer 
being the sole assurance that our eyes have not been playing 
tricks on us. 
Even the humblest of these wild neighbors—even those which 
are supposed by most country people to have not one redeeming 
feature, are intensely interesting when we become really ac¬ 
quainted with them. There is an old woodchuck neighbor of mine 
with whom I am on quite intimate terms. To be sure, we have a 
mutual understanding about the vegetable garden—that is sacred 
ground, and he knows about as well as I do that the climate there 
is unhealthy for woodchucks. Therefore we live at peace, and I 
in a neighborly way protect him from 
some of his enemies—the dog, the 
shotgun and the steel trap. All sum¬ 
mer I see him sunning himself on my 
wall, or standing bolt upright and look¬ 
ing very much like a stump, in the mid¬ 
dle of my clover field. In the fall, fat 
as a well-fed pig, he retires to his un¬ 
derground chamber, where in a bed of 
leaves and grass he curls himself up 
and waits for the spring to bring the 
clover back. Once I called on him in 
March, and as he did not come to the 
door, I walked right in, with the aid of 
a pick and shovel. I found my neigh¬ 
bor in bed, as dead to the world as the 
“Sleeping Beauty.” I proceeded to 
wake him, not with a kiss, but gently, 
and he acted much better, on the 
whole, than a human neighbor would 
have done under similar circumstances. 
Instead of saying unprintable things, 
he merely opened his sleepy eyes, 
raised himself on his fore¬ 
legs, yawned the most heart¬ 
felt yawn I have ever seen, 
stretched, and rolled over in 
bed, by all his actions begging 
for “just another week.” 
The chipmunk is another of 
our neighbors whom we shall 
see in the warm weather only. 
He is more sociable than the 
woodchuck, and if we are not 
going in for bulbs, and if he 
does not get the habit of de¬ 
stroying birds’ nests, we may 
live on very intimate terms 
with him. Last summer one 
of our chipmunks was so 
friendly that when Mrs. 
Baynes was picking wild 
strawberries, he would put his 
head into the cup which she 
held in her hand and pick out 
the finest berries as fast as 
she picked them. He was almost human. 
Chipmunks often sit on our doorstep within a foot or two of 
us and eat anything we offer them. Like the woodchucks, they 
too spend the winter in underground burrows, 
but unlike the woodchucks, they carry in con¬ 
siderable quantities of food to last 
them through the long winter. That is 
We can easily imagine Brer Fox thinking, 
“I wonder if I can reach that hen.” 
Evidently it wasn’t such a hard jump after all. But do not condemn the 
fox entirely, for he is a valuable destroyer of certain pests 
