I'm Hugh aka Marlin Perkins

In case you weren’t around in the late 1960’s or early 1970’s, Marlin Perkins was the host of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. Marlin knew everything there was to know about animals. Or at least his teleprompter did. Whether he was truly an animal expert, or he simply did a good job reading the cue cards, every Sunday evening he would bring a “Wild Kingdom” right into your living room. Yep, when I was a boy, the name Marlin Perkins was synonymous with African animals.

Our house backs up to a wooded area plus a body of water of some kind. I‘m not sure if it’s a creek, or a pond, but it’s some kind of at least semi-natural body of water. I guess it’s my own, somewhat slightly less, wild kingdom.

There are four or five of these creek/pond bodies of water in my neighborhood and about 1/3 of the houses, like mine, back up to them. Most of the houses that back up to these creeks have backyards that are landscaped right down to the water. Some even have little docks with paddleboats and there are fountains out in the middle of the water. For some reason, ours is the only one where there are woods between the water and the back fences of the houses. Maybe that’s to blame.

I’m not sure why, but for the last few weeks we have been inundated with wildlife of one kind or another.

I wrote about my snake adventure, but what I failed to mention was that the snake I killed was actually the second snake I found on my sun porch. The first one was much smarter and took off as soon as I opened the door.

Last August, I wrote about finding two baby opossums in my grill. I chased them off, but I’ve had two more opossum sightings in the last week.

We’ve also had an armadillo as well as a raccoon marching around in the yard. Top it all off with me finding a turtle in my pool last night. He was only about as big around as a baseball, so I snagged him in my pool net and slid him under the fence.

We’ve only lived in this house for a little over a year, but I’m beginning to feel a bit like I’m trapped in one of the lost episodes of Wild Kingdom. I half expect Marlin Perkins to knock on the door with a microphone and begin recording:

“Here at the Atkinson household you have to walk carefully and keep your eyes peeled. Up ahead in the foliage we can detect the distinct territorial marking behaviors of Didelphis virginiana, more commonly known as North American opossum. A marsupial, the opossum has been around for about 70-80 million years, which makes it one of the oldest surviving mammals. While not commonly considered dangerous, it can be quite fierce when cornered.”

I’ll keep you posted on any future Wild Kingdom adventures I happen to have.