My dog killed and semi-ate a baby squirrel this afternoon.

I heard the baby’s muffled shrieks quite clearly, since I was in my bedroom (reading James Agee: Selected Poems, sent to me by its editor, Andrew Hudgins, an old friend of this blog who read of my enthusiasm for Agee here) and the dog was in his fenced-in yard just outside the bedroom’s sliding doors.

I didn’t know I was hearing my dog killing a squirrel. My house sits in the middle of a wide, long, heavily wooded lot, and from my bedroom I often hear, late at night, animals tormenting and killing other animals. My vague assumption is that I’m hearing foxes killing rabbits. Along with coyote and deer and owls and raccoons and hawks and opossums and turtles and crows and mice and mourning doves and cats and bats and rats and minks, many foxes and rabbits live on our half-acre. I assumed this was a late afternoon version of the fox/rabbit scenario.

But how could that be? I looked up from my book. In the fox/rabbit scenario, the shrieks aren’t muffled. They’re piercing.

From my bed I saw my dog leap about in an unfamiliar way. Something flapped in his mouth.

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As I dealt with this problem, I began a mental reckoning of the whole animal thing around here, a green corner of urban Bethesda, Maryland.

Around here. Just on our property.

There are the massive holes in a neat straight line down the sides of our wood house, put there by generations of woodpeckers. There are the slightly less massive holes, in no particular pattern, behind our house, above the sliding doors to the deck — the work of generations of carpenter bees.

I’m always batting away spider webs on my way out of the house.  Dead snakes make concentric circles in the street.  Beetles and potato bugs and worms swarm when you shift a particle of dirt.  Don’t get me started on mosquitoes.

When you turn on the basement light on your way to the washing machine, teams of crickets hop up your legs.

Birds are always hurling themselves against our sliding glass doors.  Sometimes they die.

Sometimes hundreds of crows come to town and caw for days.

Faithful readers will recall that last summer, returning from a week in Upstate, New York, Les UDs discovered a dead deer a few feet from their back steps.

There’s almost always something living in the attic, making housekeeping sounds.  Last time Mr UD was up there, he called down to UD.

“Know those snorkel fins?  Something ate them.”

Something very big is up there at the moment.  Gotta call animal control again.

And yes.  Every time they come they nail shut more entry points.

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Sure, there’s an upside.  During the summer, on very dark nights, when you walk out back, you drift into a golden field of fireflies.  Butterflies and hummingbirds buzz the plants out front.

A few years ago, a charming toad took up such long residence beside our front door that I named her —  Elpheba.

When you sit on our green Adirondack chairs, cats appear out of nowhere and kiss your knees.

Portions of the property are well-established settlements.  The mourning doves gather to cluck and coo in a clearing a few steps up the hill behind the house.  The foxes have their dens on the other side of the fence at the top of the property, in the narrow strip of wood before the land drops down to the train tracks.  The rabbits inhabit a stand of honeysuckle halfway to the hilltop.  The deer can be found lying at leisure in groups of four or five way up the hill, in a thick copse.

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To some extent, the animals have succeeded in keeping me off my own property.  Since my dog goes apeshit when he sees deer, I have to retreat when I’m walking him out back and deer appear.  Which is often.  This afternoon, a large rabbit insisted on staying put close to us, and I had to place my body between the rabbit and the dog to keep the dog from rushing the rabbit.  The noisy carnage out there in the evenings discourages me from night walks.