Some years back, I was walking into a suburban McDonald's, and saw a rabbit hopping around in the tiny median with bushes. When I walked inside, I commented on it, saying something about that was not a very safe place for said rabbit, given that it was a dozen or so feet from a very busy road. The McDonald's worker told me the rabbit had been living there for a couple of years now, and was doing quite well.

I think about that often when I think about how animals adapt to conditions.

When I lived in Boulder, CO, in the late 1980's, they had a city deer herd. Probably several hundred deer lived in the city, roamed the streets quite freely. The first house we lived in often had deer in the back yard, because the fences were maybe four feet high. Our second place had the high privacy fence, about seven feet high, tall enough to keep the deer out. But we'd often see them walking up and down the street out front, especially at twilight.

Various people I knew acknowledged they had deer more or less permanently in their yard, and they say things like, Our deer had twins last year, only one fawn this year.

Life is endlessly adaptable. As awful as climate change is going to be for us humans, there will be organisms that thrive.

We are by no means rural, though we in the neighborhood are fond of the trees and bushes around the houses, such as they are. The rabbits are big suckers! They've learned how to use neighborhood fences to escape from anything that looks like it might be a predator--they can get through the metal bars or under a fence where an attacker can't.

The rabbits are amazingly adaptable.

We did some repairs and they moved down the street aways...that's when the rabbits moved in! I'll take rabbits over skunks any day~~!

In the early winter of 1987 we were living in Golden, CO. One snowy day I went to go out the front door, and there was a skunk, curled up on my front porch. Just lying there quietly, exuding that skunk odor. So I closed the door, and we went outside through the garage. That skunk stayed there for two days. Every so often I'd look out the door and it was still there. Eventually it moved on.

Looking back on it, that was a lot like the behavior of a stray cat who comes to your house, determined you'll be her next family. That happened to me once, wonderful cat, had her the rest of her life. But skunks aren't domesticated animals likely to be seeking a new human family. Maybe it was just warmer on my porch than out in the snow.

A few months later someone told me that where we lived had been known in the past as skunk alley.

The feral cats in the area just LOVE my porch, which is up high in full sun during the day, soaks up warmth, has a little roof on top of it and is appropriately angled so it stays snow free--it is a safe and warm place, relatively speaking.

The neighbors feed them, but they love my porch...glad it's cats and not skunks though!