I am by no means a farmer, but my backyard has welcomed so many different animals. My backyard is next to a farm, separated only by a barbed wire fence and that I live in a small village outside of Buffalo, New York called Alden. One of the many random animal that has wandered into my backyard was a billy goat, specifically two of them. They came lumbering out of the forest and stopped at the edge for a while. They weren’t even from the nearby farm! To this day, we still don’t know where they came from and they have never come back. Some animals that did come from the farm were five cows that had gotten loose and started trudging through our backyard and drinking from our pool. My dad, having spent time on his grandfather’s dairy farm, easily wrangled them back to where they came through the fence, not even worried that these were 5 huge, one ton dairy cows. My cousin and I ran outside to watch the spectacle unfold ready to sprint away if a cow even looked at us. In addition to common farm animals, we have had various wild animals run through. We have always had bunnies, squirrels, birds, and chipmunks, but we also see deer, foxes, possum, and even coyotes. We even once had a flock of thirty turkeys race past in the small set of trees near the fence. I recall looking out the window with my mom at them, and she remarked, “There’s Thanksgiving dinner.”
I have always loved having all of these animals come through my backyard. Being able to glance out the window and spot a fawn scampering around with its mother or being able to follow the tracks of a bunny through the snow is an experience that I can’t find elsewhere. I couldn’t really get that kind of experience anywhere else. These are some of my favorite stories from home and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.