Where I live in Liverpool, NY, there are woods that frame my backyard. I’m not an outdoors person, so it’s pretty strange that I’d live in a house with woods. The benefit is that I have no one living behind me, which means we have some privacy. The negative is that we would never know if someone was out there unless they got too close to the house, when the lights would come on.

The thing is that the lights come on all the time. They come on in really bad weather, so snowstorms keep the lights on for a long time. They also come on because of the different animals that frequent the area. The big animals we kind of expect; that would be the deer, turkey, foxes and coyotes (or coy dogs; we’re really not sure but they have big paws). What we hadn’t expected was that some smaller animals also set it off; rabbits of a certain size, skunks, and a few other things I’ve never been able to identify.

As I said, I’m not an outdoors person. However, a few days ago I was looking out into the woods kind of at dusk, and I realized just how far in I could see. Without the foliage that’s normally on the trees, and without the snow that we usually have prominently at this time of year (just 2 days ago everything was covered with snow), I saw some things I’m not really used to seeing, since I don’t look out in the backyard all that often either. I mean, I look out my window but I’m usually sitting down, so I don’t pay a lot of attention to things.

This time though, I was standing up and looking back into the woods and got curious. I decided to film my adventure in case something decided I looked delicious, as I figured whatever it was wouldn’t eat the cellphone; how goofy is that? Anyway, I uploaded the video, which I’m displaying here. Enjoy it, as I do have some running commentary. It’s a bit jumpy because I was walking and unable to keep my eye on the camera all the time because it was also very slippery.