There's a significant animal population in Davis County that goes almost unnoticed and receives very little publicity.
I'm not talking about all the wandering felines or barking canines. This is actual wildlife or small farm animals on the loose.
Consider the following:
1.Squirrels: I've lived in the same west Layton home in the center of the valley for 22 years and never spotted one of these animals.
Then, in the fall of 2006, I saw one squirrel several times crossing my street.
On April 21, 2007, I realized a family of at least five squirrels had very recently made a home under my wooden deck.
My wife obtained a trap from Davis Animal Control, and over a period of two weeks, we trapped eight squirrels. When we had caught five, we thought there was only one left, and then two appeared.
Catching the squirrels became more difficult as each one got smaller. We had to add magnets to the tension plate in the cage, so the smaller ones would set off the trap door.
Finally, that wasn't even enough, and we had to add some double-sided tape to the plate so that the smallest of squirrels in my yard would have to push hard to free themselves from the sticky area and thus set off the trap.
Eight squirrels are a considerable nuisance population for a single location in the middle of a subdivision.
We let most of the squirrels loose in the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains, about six miles distant. Not a perfect location with all the homes there, but at least the critters are native to that area. Also there's some other wildlife there that help to control the squirrel population. Animal Control took one of the squirrels away.
Squirrels are cute, my wife said, but only in forests or national parks.
How did the squirrels get to my neighborhood? Perhaps they naturally migrated there, but I'm betting someone dumped them out in my area to get them out of their area. They simply aren't native to my area, or I would have spotted them years ago.
Also, some people in my area must have known much sooner that squirrels were getting a foothold, but they did nothing to capture or control them.
Aside from any disease they might carry, the squirrels damage wood and create messes.
2.Other wildlife. Walking along Layton's Main Street on May 6, I also spotted another type of wildlife — a dead raccoon along the highway across from Hometown Buffet — another signal there are other wild creatures living in and around subdivisions.
Talking with neighbors later that day, I heard stories of deer roaming in recent years a half-mile west by the old Denver and Rio Grande Train corridor. Foxes, skunks and raccoons have also been seen there.
3.Roosters. About four months ago I began hearing a rooster crow every morning.
This small farm animal is illegal in a Layton subdivision, but none of my neighbors seemed to hear or know anything about it.
I contacted Animal Control, and they came out one day around noon and found nothing. The best time to capture the chicken is early morning. (Animal Control would never come out then.)
Animal Control finally admitted it captured two loose roosters in the same area of 1100 N. Angel St. some weeks earlier.
I later heard another rooster living west in the Layton Industrial Park.
Some of my neighbors finally started complaining about the rooster, once it became warm enough that their windows were open at night, and they heard it crow at 5:30 or 6 a.m.
The rooster is still near Angel Street, narrowly being missed by school buses as it crosses the road. It lives in the back yard of someone who is apparently oblivious to the bird.
If it were closer to my home, I'd have a handle on it, but it is several layers of homes away.
So there is some real wildlife living in some Layton subdivisions, and that's probably typical of most of Davis County.
Animal Control is probably too busy policing cat and dog problems to do much about these smaller nuisance animals, but as I found, homeowners can trap and get rid of some of the critters — if they are willing to work at it.
E-mail: lynn@desnews.com