All Creatures Great & Small: Part 1

Genesis:1:20-23

20 And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.

21 And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

22 And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.

23 And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.

When you read the creation account in Genesis Chapter 1 one can only marvel at the various animals God created. 

Winged animals, hoofed animals, animals that live in the sea and that crawl on the ground...  

Who would believe... certainly I couldn't believe, that my family and I would live in a house - on a piece of land that had them ALL!!  

Okay - it feels like we live with them ALL.  

Please forgive the hyperbole, drama, histrionics, etc... Stay with me...  

Our house is situated on a piece of property that comprises the Old Johnson Diary that served North Florida for many years. Many of the streets in the surrounding neighborhood, are named after various members of the Johnson family. 

Most mornings when we wake up, we can see a gaggle of turkeys in our back yard. With the male turkeys spreading their wings like a peacock and preening and prancing around the female turkeys. It's quite a spectacle!! 

Many an evening, we'll return home to find deer in our driveway. As soon as they see our headlights, they bound away gracefully and quickly into the Natural Preserve that sits in front of our house, . We have braying donkeys that demand to be fed by my husband and armadillos that blindly toddle around our front yard foraging for food.  

On a nightly basis, we have to fight the frogs and geckos that paste themselves to our front door in order to get inside. 

We truly have a unique "eco-system" right outside our windows - or so I thought.  

When we first moved into our home over 16 years ago, our brother in Christ James Hoskins, said he saw bear prints in our yard and felt they belonged to a black bear.  

Of course I was terrified BUT my husband was excited by this news. "Bear Prints huh!" I saw the utter glee and delight in his eyes when he heard this news. My husband has "Paul Bunyan" in his blood and LOVES the outdoors, nature, etc... NATURE on PBS, National Geographic, Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom are some of his favorite shows.

Anyway, the point is we have owls in our trees that hoot at us at night, and birds that build nests in the hedges outside our door that dive bomb at our heads if we walk too close to their nests.  

Bald-head Wasps that build HUGE nests in our trees at the front of the house.  

True Story: One day Lester was lying in the grass one sunny day and took his bible and some water out on the lawn with him. He must have dozed off to sleep only to wake up and see movement above his head.  

Several large vultures were circling over his head - salivating because they thought he was "dead meat" ready to be picked clean to the bone!!  

Once, a skunk found his way into our garage one morning and made us all late to work and school. When I tried to explain to the girls' teacher what happened, she looked at me like I had three heads. She probably said to herself "you're telling a big fat lie lady".

We've killed our share of snakes, small, medium, large and we even have a black racer who suns himself on our hedges every Summer.  

However, nothing could have prepared me for the event that occurred just a few short weeks ago...