Barbara Neff, of Castle Pines, wrote a wonderfully honest and thought-provoking blog column last week about wildlife.

Rather than responding in the comment section, I decided to throw my two cents in here on my blog instead.

Our home in Parker backs to what is known in these parts as "open space". Basically it is just a large field of scrub and cactus, home of a prairie dog town. When we moved into this house four years ago, we heard our neighborhood coyotes almost nightly.

Now we are lucky to hear them once a week. Construction is encroaching on our little field from all sides. But the tenacious little prairie dogs have remained.

I will admit right now that I am an "animal person". We have always had pets. At one point three dogs, two cats, a rabbit, two mice, a bird, and a fish all shared our home. Now it's just a dog, a cat, a bird, and the fish.

But I have enjoyed (for the most part) all of the wildlife we've encountered living here. Springtime is fun with the prairie dog moms corralling their young out back. Our resident squirrel pair (Archie and Edith) torment our dog with their antics when we put peanuts and dried corn out for them.

This snowy winter we've seen a tenfold increase in the quantities of wild birds to the feeders in the backyard. Gosh, I even think the cottontail rabbits are cute. (My neighbor shoots them with a pellet gun.) Had a barn owl sit on the fence one afternoon. What a treat! Or a hoot, I guess I should say.

Haven't seen any deer for quite awhile now. Ditto with the foxes. And the golden eagles that hung around our first autumn here have never returned. Funny thing about large machines grumbling about that seems to scare off all but the most determined of nature's beasts.

The prairie rattlesnake that passed through our backyard one afternoon last summer I could've done without. But even that incident I used as a learning tool to educate our then 5 year old. We watched Mr. Snake go about his business from the safety of our dining room windows. (This process alone was the very definition of "arduous", as snakes, as I now know, tend to move very, very s-l-o-w-l-y.)

Later we found some websites and learned that he had probably been searching for water (which our sprinklers provide) and/or shade to lower his body temperature. We talked about how dangerous rattlesnakes can be if provoked, surprised, or frightened. (Much like his mother, actually.) And we even listened to a recording of a snake rattle. http://sdsnake.com/Snake/rattle.wav

This brings me to the coyotes. Personally I have a great deal of respect for a creature which adapts seemingly so easily to all that we humans dole out. I love hearing their late night yip-yip chorus, even though I know it generally means they've found a meal out back.

I always hope it's not someone's kitty. But I guess that is the price one occasionally pays for living as close as we do to this "urban natureland". The more we humans fill this world with our own species, the more frequent these human/domestic animal vs. wild animal encounters will become.

So I keep my cat inside. I turn outside lights on when my dog goes out at night. And I talk to our son (as I will later also talk to his young brothers) about the creatures we share our corner of the world with. We talk about not approaching wild animals.

We talk about why these animals sometimes act the way they do. Even at six, he can tell you how to back slowly away from a coiled rattler or why the baby prairie dogs slowly decrease in number during the spring and early summer.

Don't get me wrong. I would be devastated if I lost any of my own furry critters to a predator. I just practice prevention. It seems a small price to pay for having an entire eco-system right in my own back yard.

I'd like to think that somehow we human-folk will find a way to co-exist with our animal brethren. Somehow I doubt it though. Our collective history with animal conservation doesn't really speak too well. Just ask the American Bison of the Great Plains who gave their lives by the thousands so we could build railroads.

Yes, I fear the only coyotes my great-grandchildren will ever see will be at the Denver Zoo.