Wild Animals in the Back Yard!

The other day I went out into the back yard for a bit and as I'm sitting there I keep hearing a rather loud and frantic CHIRP! CHIRP! CHIRP! CHIRP!. We do have mockingbirds around here that get angry when cats come too close to their nests, like a few days ago when I went out front to take some trash out and heard loud mockingbirds and then see a big cat falling out of our tree. A big cat who then took off across the yard with mockingbirds dive bombing it all the way to the neighbor's yard. A big cat that I had never seen before, not being one of the usual pesky strays. So, I'm thinking it's a mockingbird up in the tree or on the roof of the shed and it keeps chirping so I started looking around for a mockingbird to see what was bothering it so much.

Millie is over by the toolshed where there is a plastic box still sitting against the wall from when we cleaned out the shed and then never got everything put back in there, and she is going from side to side of the box trying to get in behind it, so I'm thinking that there is a baby bird trapped behind it and mama bird is in a panic.

No, it was not a baby bird but a big fat brown ground squirrel.

Which Millie was not barking at. Which I thought was very odd since she barks at everything and if she'd been barking I would have investigated things a little sooner rather than sitting there for a while listening to what I thought was a bird chirping.

I pick Millie up and take her inside, shut the doggy door, then as I'm trying to go back outside to check on the squirrel, she zooms out the sliding door between my feet and back over to where the squirrel is. I pick her up again and that is when the squirrel makes a break for it and runs out from behind the box and away so fast that all I saw was a blur. I'm assuming it ran up over the fence but really don't know what happened to it because it was FAST.

Then she spent the next 15 minutes or so looking for that squirrel. Buddy and Mimi were outside but I think they thought it was a bird too and were smart enough not to get anywhere near it because they know from experience that mockingbirds do not like cats.

Now I know that a squirrel in the yard is commonplace in many neighborhoods but not in mine. We do have a lot of ground squirrels here in town but they usually live in more open areas, like along one of the main roads near our house where there is a big park like area along the road with a winding sidewalk, trees, grass and lots and lots of squirrel burrows complete with squirrels. This one must have gotten lost. I have never seen a squirrel inside our housing area before and how he found his little way to our yard I'll never know.