This is a good place to explain/show my layout here.
We are on a single acre, 1.1 acres (the .1 means something for taxes and water pricing)
My property is the red roof house to the left. I share the property line with the house/barn with the grey-black roof that is to the north (up image). That property line extends back to the small black roof building to the right-east. It is defined to the south by that faint white line to the south (towards the image bottom).
Want to talk about a straight line? That white line is a line of sandbags that I stacked to control hillside runoff.
Now, everything to my east (left )and south (down page), are at the base of a sharply rising mountainside that we live on. That open land is about half of what is there. The rest rise up the hillside, and then drop back down the other side of the hill on a ridge; I guess it to be likely 15 acres+. These is a lot of open land here, and it interconnectable all the way to Orange County, via river bottoms, and national forest, state forest and private ranches. It is entirely possible for a Mountain lion to travel over 50 miles from the OC, to my backyard, without having to cross major roads, and mostly accessible through deep creek ravines that connect the entire distance.
That red roof house, in closer,....
All of the shots (A,B,C,D,E) from the patio are backstopped by a sharply rising hillside, at the arrow points, that provides an 8' step up to the next property up the slope. Patio shot B has a backstop of stacked wood.
The sharply rising hillside grading cut, behind me ,rises up to over 9' tall, immediately, requiring that I did extensive stone walls and terracing to the length of nearly 350' on the south line, and up to over 9' tall. The mountain behind us keeps sharply rising to over 1000' higher than us, in the form of an extinct volcanic cone.
All of the North Corner shots are from the graded edge of the house lot. It is probably 12' higher than the down range Lime tree grove area.
Note my straight white line of sandbags, as viewed from outerspace. Straight enough?
So, I ended up taking out all of the rodents that approached us from uphill, and turned my attentions to the North Corner, which is a Lime grove area of my front yard (septic leach field).
I eventually cleaned out that area, and followed where the rodents were coming from.
They were coming from an abandoned Macadamia Nut farm that is across our access road. So, I set up blinds out at the front edge of the property that overlooked the Nut Farm. Those blinds are labeled as 1,2,3.
I call those blinds my Outposts; The Western Outpost (1), the Northwestern Outpost, and, the Green Waste Bins Outpost (2), and #3 being some native shrubs along my driveway. I reach back onto the south property from #3.
This is downrange from blind #3:
This is #3
This is The Western Outpost, #2 on the legend image.
And, these are the shots from the Western Outpost. They range out to 300' measured with a walking wheel measurer. And, they are on the other side of our little dell canyon, as you can see, a sharply rising backstop.
It is elevated above the downrange area by a substantial bit. That put me at great advantage.
And, this is the Northwestern Outpost.
The NW Outpost is a small blind, and dedicated to a slot between the Macadamia Nut Trees (all the trees that you can see). This one can range outward to 150'+
I cannot tell you how many rodents perished from the Outposts.
And, this is the Outposts supervisor, Kitty.
She came to us after living for a couple of years in the wild edge to our south. She was quite close to being a feral cat, but, a nice one that liked people.
We get large packs of Coyotes every single night, and she avoided that, and lived on her own for those couple of years.
She now sleeps with me on my bed, and is an indoor cat for 18 hours a day.
She howls at the moon to get out at first daylight (6AM), and wants to be inside by noon.
Some content regarding the Cat has been edited out. I didn't realize how hot that topic is here.
