Wildlife babies......

I think I know what will 'do me in' out here in the country.... it will be the cries of the young livestock and the capture of itty-bitty baby animals.

Two things yesterday that nearly brought me to tears: a baby goat that got separated from its mother, and a tiny baby bunny that was left by our back door by our mostly-outside cat Gatsby.

Yesterday afternoon, I was in the kitchen and my husband was out in the yard taking photos of the blooming wisteria by the garage. Not only is the wisteria covered with huge purple blooms, but the entire bush is now inhabited by hundreds of huge bumble-bees. If you walk quickly past the wisteria, the colony of bees will fly out of the bush and hover around it, waiting till you get onto the porch until they settle down into the purple blossoms. (And quickly is the only way to walk past the wisteria when it's in bloom-- you only slow up and admire the flowers when you get to the safety of the porch.)

The baby goat...... I heard it loud and clear from inside the house, and when a baby goat cries, it sounds like a baby A baby. And it was so loud that I thought it was right in the front yard. Out onto the porch I went, and there was the baby goat, standing in the road and trying to get to its mother who was on the other side of the neighbor's fence. The baby goat was too little to have jumped over the fence, so it must have gotten out on the other side of the field and walked down the hill.

So there was the baby goat, crying its heart out on one side of the fence, and there was the mother goat, calling for her baby and trying to get to it from inside the fence. My husband started walking down our hill, hoping to get the baby goat to run down the hill, make a left at the end of the road, then run up the hill and make a left at the end of that road, and get back into the field. In my mind, I thought that would just never happen. But that's exactly how it worked out, and the baby goat got back to its mama and the crying sounds stopped on both sides of the fence. The cries from the baby goat were heart-breaking, absolutely heart-breaking.

And then the baby bunny....... Gatsby was outside last night, as he has been since the weather turned from Spring to Summer when we weren't paying attention. When Gatsby wants to come inside, he will bang his paw on the screen door, and that's what he did. I let him inside and he ran into the TV room and banged his paw on that screen door, wanting to go back out again. 'Crazy cat,' is what I told him, and I let him outside again. And that's when I saw the baby bunny on the door-mat, and Gatsby was trying to pick it up and bring it in the house.

I don't know what I screamed out, but within two seconds, my husband was at the door and out on the porch, picking up Gatsby and getting him back into the house before he got to the little bunny again. By that time, both Mickey and Sweet Pea were trying to get a look at Gatsby's prize, so I was trying to keep all three cats away from the door.

My husband picked up the tiny bunny..... it wasn't moving, didn't seem to be breathing. This beautiful, perfectly furry, adorable tiny bunny baby, stolen from its bunny-family by our cat. And this isn't the first time.... Gatsby brought us a baby bunny last year and I can still hear its screams as Gatsby had it cornered out on the porch. Heaven only knows how many baby bunnies Gatsby has caught that we don't even know about.

We left the baby bunny out on the steps last night.... just in case it was indeed breathing after all. I kept Gatsby inside all night so he wouldn't go bunny-hunting again. Gatsby came into the TV room with us, jumped on my lap, stretched himself out with his back paws on my legs and his front paws on my chest, and then he buried his head in my neck. I wanted to be so mad at him, but he is what he is, and he did what a cat does...... he was just being a cat. "I am a cat and that's that."

This morning, I asked my husband if the baby bunny was still outside. He told me He hopped away during the night so I'm sure he's just fine. I heard that inflection in his voice..... the baby bunny did not hop away. Translation: my husband put the baby bunny into the trash can this morning before I got up.

Life in the country. It's peaceful and it's beautiful and next month our fields will be carpeted with 37 varieties of wildflowers. There are no traffic jams and no over-built neighborhoods teeming with shopping centers and parking lots. We have no six-foot wooden fences separating us from our neighbors.

What we do have, however, are critters and creatures and crawling things of every size and description. Mama cows moaning for their calves who have been taken to market, baby goats crying when they get separated from their mothers, tiny bunnies who get rabbit-napped by an outside cat. People abandon cats and dogs in the hills, wild hogs get shot and left to die on country roads, hawks fly in endless circles looking for chickens, coyotes hunt after dark for any small animal they can kill and eat.

This serene and peaceful country life is going to break my heart right in half.