Yesterday, Laurence and I returned home from an appointment to discover that there was some kind of construction going on behind our house. The above picture shows what things looked like in April 2021. There’s a dense tree patch right behind the fence, followed by woodsy scrubland. That used to go all the way to the highway, which was quite some distance, but early in 2022, some construction began. An apartment complex was going up, which meant a lot of the woods and scrubland were being bulldozed to the ground.

I discussed this a little back in March. It’s when I started seeing all the cats in our yard, and began to try to TNR and provide a safe space for displaced feral colonies. In the end, most of those cats must have found food sources elsewhere, because only one, Lord Grey, adopted our yard and the woods behind our yard as his home base. We feed him twice a day, and provide water 24/7 for him and all the other animals who stop by overnight (foxes, raccoons, possums, skunks, and armadillos). The birds and squirrels also share the cat food during the day, whatever pellets Lord Grey leaves behind, and the system has been mutually beneficial for everyone.

In the beginning, we worried that this construction would rip out all the green space, but it seemed to stop and leave a generous strip between the new apartment buildings and my neighborhood. For half a year, we haven’t worried. Then we came home yesterday to find some kind of bulldozer and claw machine ripping down the trees right behind ours and our neighbors’ fences.

(this morning’s view)

Thankfully, they didn’t (yet) rip out the very tall tree that all the mourning doves roost in. They stopped and went around that tree and the cedar that’s between it and our fence. I don’t think their machine could get through. But later in the day, a man came by with a chainsaw to cut more things down and drag out larger limbs and trunks. Again, he seemed to stop right before the big tangle of trees on the west side of the fence, but the crew will be back. In fact, I already hear chainsaw noise in the distance this morning – and by the time I finished writing this post, they were directly behind my fence, severing more trees and limbs. Who knows what the view from my deck will look like tonight, or tomorrow, or next week? I’m not sure what the goal of this is – to cut everything down and expand the buildings all the way to our fence-lines? To thin out the green space only? To manicure the green space into something to they can market to potential renters?

One positive note. We didn’t know if little Lord Grey would be back, now that his habitat has been largely cut down, but he did return for food this morning. I can’t say for sure if he’ll keep returning, given that this seems to be an ongoing process. But I hope so. We’ll keep putting food out for him for as long as he stays around here!