An exuberant weasel lives under my garden shed. I saw it first in winter. Sleek and glistening, with creamy white fur and a black nose, eyes and tail tip, it scampered from the garden shed to disappear under a planter. It was dressed for winter as an ermine, the creature whose short tail once edged the robes of European nobility. It came back in summer, drenched with rain, dressed in trench-coat taupe.

The bobcat who lives on the ledge above us chases away feral cats. This occurs at midnight and sounds like a shrieking catfight in an alley between tall brick buildings. The sight of long striped cat legs on the front deck is startling.

Our road wanders through hill, ledge, and wetland, probably tracing the same path the colonists walked and the magnificent Concord stagecoaches traversed a century later. Coyotes and a black bear with two cubs live across the road, a named and numbered state highway. In the beaver bogs, moose and great blue heron feed. The wild turkeys usually fly across the road in the winter, but, in the summer, the two toms stand on the berm with the harem behind them, and wait for cars to stop. Those of us who live here do.

My urban colleagues at work enjoy reminding me that I live in the "Nature Conservancy," which encompasses the wetland at the bottom of the hill. Before we became politically and environmentally aware, we called them "swamps"- breeding grounds for mosquitoes, black flies and such, and thus to be shunned, or worse, drained or backfilled. Now, we're grateful that the wetland filters and purifies the water table and shelters the dragonflies, frogs, salamanders and other wild life.

The acorn and beech mast harvest was light last fall, so I saw four red squirrels in the bird feeders. I have a friend who criticizes my winter bird feeding as environmentally undesirable. As a gardener, my defense is that the chickadees, nuthatches, woodpeckers, and turkeys feed their babies insects in the summer, so I want them to live here year round and diminish the bad bugs in my garden. Yet even I doubt that chickadees distinguish between the beneficial garden bugs and the destructive ones.

Who knows what the deer on the hill ate last winter. They often go for my hostas and azaleas. I don't intentionally feed deer, and the landscape plants I chose came mostly from the lists of last resorts for deer, but I lean toward native plants as first choices, and when deer are starving, they eat everything and anything. The local deeryard is on my land, an accident of topography, so deer will be here when the temperatures drop and the wind howls. That same hemlock ravine that shelters the deer hosts the precious red-breasted nuthatches I adore. I encourage local hunters who prefer venison and practice rifle and archery safety.

Chickadees are so socially charming and entertaining when I'm out pruning, shoveling snow, or cutting dinner table flowers. The beat of their wings whistles. The puff of air in my face displaced by those wing beats still amazes me with its force. The chickadees eat some hollyhock seeds among the millions in the garden. I can share with chickadees and nuthatches, but not deer, red squirrels or woodchucks. I wonder what that says about my character.

The last woodchuck to move here dug a burrow under a lilac tree. Every morning, he stood on his hind legs and scratched his back on the corner of the garden shed, just like the meerkats in the "Lion King" or the San Diego Wild Animal Park.

His fourth day out, the woodchuck ate all the lilies in the garden. When the gas can tipped over during a groundhog exercise session in the shed, my husband cleaned and loaded his rifle. He claimed he hit the woodchuck, but we never found or smelled the carcass, so maybe it just moved elsewhere. Maybe the bobcat prevailed. I forgot to fill in the hole with rocks and soil come fall, and the next spring, half the lilac tree failed to leaf out. I'm fairly certain the weasel lives there now.

The mice are gone from the potting shed. A few clay pots are scattered and broken. Whether the hole in the spilled bag of perlite came from the mouse, the scampering weasel, or both, perlite is easy to sweep. The potting soil no longer sprouts sunflowers from mouse seed caches. The lilac tree recovered when pruned. I'm hoping for another glance at the ermine.

By Cheryl Grabe, UNH Cooperative Extension Master Gardener