You may wonder why mourning doves need human assistance in incubating their eggs. After all, birds, along with bees, are the poster-creatures for animal reproduction. These lovebirds were no exception, but they needed me to do one specific task: open the garage door to let them out in the morning.

You see, for the second year in a row, mourning doves have built a nest in my garage and laid their eggs there. Last year, we doomed three tiny doves to die in ovo. The parents had nested on top of our garage-door opener, and my wife — fearing that the bird dropping would gum up the works of this contraption — tried to slide some cardboard under the nest. This proved deadly.

This year’s dove nest sits on a brick pillar in our garage, and so Katie thinks everything might work, as long as each morning we open the garage to let the parents in and out. Each night, to assuage her guilt from last year, we are to shut the garage doors to keep out the raccoons.

I do not know whether eggs are a raccoon’s preferred breakfast, but Katie is right to expect these furry carnivores in our garage. One raccoon took up lodging on this same brick pillar during our first winter here.

That particular raccoon, I should be clear, is no longer a threat, having been extinguished by my two dogs in a memorable and bloody Christmas morning. Those same dogs, on this self-same morning in fact, had already exterminated another raccoon, wetting my dirt with blood while I wet the sod with water.

In this column, someday soon, I hope to give proper attention to these raccoons with which we share our property. But for now, I tell of the recent April morning when I helped my dogs dispose of a raccoon before letting out the mourning doves, to illustrate how unexpectedly full my tidy suburban life in Fairfax County is of wildlife — birth and death, feather and fur, predator and prey.

Your columnist spends his 9-to-5 hours interviewing members of Congress and voters, poring over campaign finance records, and opining on politics in these pages — quite the contrast to the more elemental concerns of his early mornings and his weekends. It’s reminiscent of the shock felt by the fictional columnist William Boot in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. Boot is a gardening columnist sent off to cover an African coup. As a political columnist who is now asked to cover gardening, I’ve named this space after Boot’s column, “Lush Places.”

Just this spring, we have had a fox on our back porch, white-tail deer families in our yard, a mockingbird trapped in our screened porch, and a nightly show of circling bats. Last year, we were visited by an extended family of mice and a colony of kudzu bugs. I have been stung by yellow jackets in my yard and a European hornet in my kitchen. In our first days here, we had approximately 44 goats and one llama in our backyard — a moment that has led the locals to call ours Goat Hill.

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On this dawn, as I finally grabbed my coffee once the raccoon was discarded and the doves liberated, I joked to Katie that we were operating “a wildlife refuge up here on Goat Hill.”

Reflecting on the fate of the raccoons, the grim conditions of the dove nests two straight springs, and the discourtesy of the uninvited mice and hornets, Katie offered her concurring opinion: “The worst wildlife refuge ever.”

Tim Carney is the senior political columnist at the Washington Examiner and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.