A reader personalizes the topic:
I'm a bit of an urban nature enthusiast. My wife and I have lived in two different Dallas-area homes since getting married in 2000 – both embedded in densely urban areas of town. And both set adjacent to creeks. Creeks serve as wild animal highways for urban areas, since they eventually dump into a river or flow out into the more rural countryside.
Rural-based animals will run the creeks and rivers or urban areas and sometimes find city living to their liking. Many birds and smaller mammals, like raccoons, opossums, small rodents and squirrels, have probably always lived on these creeks and were never forced to leave when housing developments built up around them. Maybe they, along with garbage cans, provide sources of food for larger mammals that wander in.
My wife and I have seen coyotes (my video), grey foxes (my video again), bobcats, a 6-foot rat snake (my dad's pic), great horned owls, barred owls, screech owls, ospreys, various hawks, opossums, and raccoons. And all within a two-house radius of our home.
At a neighborhood picnic, I once spoke to a fellow who works for our city's animal control unit. He told me a story of being called to the home of a German Shepherd owner who awoke one morning to find his dog missing from the back yard. But along the back fence – a 6-foot wooden fence – there was a bloody trail from the ground straight up to the top of the fence. His best guess was that a mountain lion had wandered into town, killed the dog, and dragged it over the fence. Personally, I've heard many first hand accounts of people having occasionally spotted mountain lion tracks on rural properties outside of Dallas-Ft. Worth proper. So I don't doubt this animal control worker's logic.
The above video was shot last week in Boulder. There's a great photo of the bear captured mid-fall here.
The Dish 