wildlife

Yesterday afternoon I walked down to the mailbox to see if the held mail notice was still in it. Just as I slammed the mailbox door, an adult black bear rounded the corner of Stanwell and Langdale, and ambled down the middle of the sidewalk, straight at me. It was fat as bears go, granted that this is the time of year for bears to be fat. Fat or not, what impressed me was that it saw me and didn’t stop ambling. On it came. Forty feet. Thirty feet. Twenty-five feet. There the bear paused, still in the middle of the sidewalk. This was closer than I’d ever been to a black bear without lots of iron between us, and way closer than I’d prefer to be. My first thought was to look for cubs. Not the time of year for that, and nothing in view. My second thought proceeded from my training as a fiction writer: What does this character want? No clue. My third thought was to start backing up, slowly. I’m thin. The bear was fat. It was about 100 feet to my front door. I started doing the math.

After I backed up ten or fifteen feet, the bear ambled across our neighbors’ gravel landscaping and galomphed down into the gully between our houses, where there is a galvanized iron pipe under Stanwell carrying runoff from farther up the mountain. It’s gotten a lot of use this (wet) summer, and was still trickling a little. The bear hunkered down and started lapping water from the open end of the pipe.

I had gotten between a bear and what it wanted, which probably isn’t a good idea. At least the bear was courteous enough to wait for me to figure that out.

Today’s animal stories don’t end there, Uncle Lar. No indeedy. On Tuesday, a skunk got into Jimi Henton’s back yard. Jimi boards the Pack when we travel (we bought three of them from her, in fact, so they’re basically family) and the four of them much enjoy the luxury of having a back yard where they can run around in circles. Aero likes to bark at animals that he sees, generally out the kitchen nook window. Here was one of a sort he doesn’t see often, and he headed off at a gallop to protect his breeder and his pack from the interloper. Shortly afterward, Jimi smelled skunk in the house. She has a doggie door into the back yard and assumed the worst. But no, it was skunk by proxy. By the time she cornered Aero in her living room the whole house reeked.

Four baths and all sorts of exotic remedies later, he still smells a little. But here’s a tip for the skunklorn: Take off the dog’s collar. Much of the smell that remained was in the leather, which is now double-bagged in the big garage trash can.

Oh, and earlier today I saw nine deer right across the street, eating the grass. This is one reason we didn’t plant grass.

Tonight I will grill a good steak in honor of the animal kingdom. I will grill it from my main deck, which lacks stairs and is 23 feet above the ground. If I see any of my animal friends down in the gully, I will wave, hold up the steak, and say, Don’t push your luck.

We had a little snow last night, which hit the ground, melted on the pavement, and then refroze to black ice before the morning. So I was out there right after breakfast, throwing some pet-friendly melt compound on the front sidewalk. The housecleaners are coming this morning, and that stretch of concrete can’t be a skating rink when they arrive.

So there I am, tossing capfuls of white granules around, when who trots nonchalantly up to me but our anomalously friendly neighborhood fox. Mr. Fox (and yes, it could be a female. Forgive me for not trying to do the test) stood in front of me like a dog at an obedience trial, looking up at me, full eye contact. He was on the opposite side of the front walk, no more than four feet away.

Four feet. This was as close as I’ve ever come to a wild animal that large, and probably twenty feet closer than I’ve ever been to a fox. He held eye contact for a few seconds, then looked at the cap I held in my left hand. (The melt compound comes in a white plastic jug exactly like the large size of laundry detergent.) He looked at the cap, then looked at me, then looked at the cap. And then, egad, he picked up his right front paw.

Hey! I know that drill! This is what Carol and I call the QRU gesture. QBit is especially good at it. If I’m eating a banana he will look at the banana, then look at me, then look at the banana, then look at me, and repeat until I give him some. In many cases, he will pick up one paw for emphasis.

QRU, as many readers here will know, is the ham radio Q-code for “Do you have anything for me?” (when followed by a question mark) or “I have nothing for you” when stated without a question mark. In ham radio, this refers to message traffic. However, in this house, it generally refers to banana, rice cakes, or something like that. I’m a soft touch and generally give QBit what he wants, but there are some things that invariably give him the runs, so instead of handing him a piece of lox I’ll just say, “QRU!”

Understanding happened when I looked at what I held in my hand: A detergent bottle cap made of white plastic, perhaps a little bigger than an extra-large…egg.

Well. As I’ve mentioned here before, somebody on the next block is giving raw eggs to the local fox, not just occasionally but on a daily basis. And I can just see Mr. Fox standing on the cultprit’s back patio, looking longingly through the sliding glass doors until Mrs. Clueless exclaims, “Harry! The fox is back! The poor thing must be hungry!” And then Mrs. Clueless goes to the fridge, pulls out an egg, opens the patio door, and lays it on the patio. Mr. Fox scoops it up and heads off to wherever fox spend their time around here.

This has been going on for a couple of years. We now have a partly Belyaev–ized fox running around, scamming the neighbors for a living and getting a little too cozy with the rest of us. Interestingly, when I put the cap back on the melt compound bottle it no longer looked like an egg, so the fox lost interest in me, continuing on past the house down into the gully.

I’d prefer it not happen, but better the local fox begging at our feet than the skunks or the bears. And I think I need to keep a camera in my pocket even when I’m only going twenty feet from the front door.

We got hit with a skunk cloud the other night, and as I cranked windows shut it struck me: We haven’t smelled skunk in several weeks. That’s remarkable, because when we first moved here we’d get intense skunk clouds at least once every night and often twice. (Here, a “skunk cloud” is a passing front of skunk smell, distinct from getting sprayed directly.) The cloud drifts with the breeze and half an hour later it’s gone unless the night is dead calm.

We considered these a fact of life, and they were with us for the first couple of years we lived here. In the fall of 2004 a skunk gave birth to a litter of four kits in the space between our house and our neighbor’s, and we have a video of the kits cavorting and wrestling with one another probably six feet from one of the lower level windows. After that skunk clouds gradually began to get scarcer, and at just about the same time, we spotted the first red fox we’d ever seen in the neighborhood. In fact, it was the first red fox I’d ever seen in the wild in the US, anywhere. (We did see one in Surrey, England, in 2000.) In 2007 a dead skunk appeared in the gully behind our house, stinking to high heaven but also heavily chewed on. I was unaware that anything but great horned owls prey on skunks, but something clearly did this one in, and by the smell of it, the last few minutes had been quite a battle.

Back in 2008, I first saw a fox running past the house with something white in its mouth. I thought it might have been something filched from a trash can overturned by a bear, and thought no more about it. However, after that we began seeing fox running around with small white objects in their mouths on a regular basis. It was not one fox, but at least two. (Their coloring is noticeably different, as you can tell once you see the same individuals two or three times.) I couldn’t get close enough to see what the white objects were until a month or so ago, when I spotted a fox digging furiously in the side of the hill next to our stone stairway. Right beside the hole was something I immediately recognized as an ordinary chicken egg.

We’ve seen fox carrying eggs twenty times or more now, to the point where it’s unusual to see a fox trot by the house without one. Somebody in the near vicinity is obviously feeding them, since there are no chicken coops in our squeakily tony neighborhood. I’ve been finding eggshells in the gully all summer. The fox are sleek and healthy, and not nearly as skittish as they used to be.

Feeding wild animals is never a good idea, and in most places it’s against the law. I want fox to be afraid of me, and if they can’t somehow find a sustainable place in the local ecosystem, feeding them doesn’t fix the problem. I’ve even got an idea who’s doing the feeding, by tracking the fox as we track meteors: I take note of which direction they’re running when they have eggs in their mouths, and the lines all point to somewhere down toward the end of the Langdale cul-del-sac.

I might pursue it…but we don’t need the skunks here. If the fox are driving out the skunks, overall it’s a plus, and pace Woody Allen, the fox need the eggs. (I don’t know how they repel skunks, and online research hasn’t turned up much.) On the other hand, if the neighbors in question stop feeding the fox, we’ll have starving and eventually diseased fox limping around, which is sad on the surface of it, and a possible hazard to people walking small dogs. (Guess who.)

This isn’t a storybook world. Animals compete, fight, and die–far too often in my gully. There are no good answers. But at least we can leave our windows open at night.

I got home from shopping for tonight’s nerd party an hour or so ago to find a phone message from Collette next door. She told me that there was a very large bear sitting in the trees behind our houses, eating a bag of dog food. I grabbed my V530 and snuck out the back door. Well, yup: There he was, about forty feet from our lower deck, with his nose stuck in a huge honking bag of Old Roy or something. Crunch, crunch, crunch.

Wow. We’ve seen bears here a time or three, though generally at dawn or dusk. Pete Albrecht and I were hanging out on our back deck a few years ago, talking astronomy about 11:30 PM, when we heard some crunching down in the gully. We looked over the deck railing, and there he was, looking up at us. He’d been harvesting the summer’s choke cherries, I’d guess. One leg of my improvised Field Day inverted vee terminates down there a few yards from the bear, and I was doing that only yesterday.

We went back and looked again when Carol got home a few minutes ago, but he was gone. So was the dog food bag–so I guess he got tired of being stared at, packed up his Old Roy, and went elsewhere.

Don’t know whose dog food it was, but in any event, better the dog food than the dogs.