by Peg Kehret
He is a good hunter, and occasionally leaves a dead mouse on the doormat, as my thank-you gift. He has even caught moles. He eats all except their wicked-looking front claws, and their heads. Those he leaves for me to find and bury.
Mr. Stray recognizes me. When I look out the window, to see if he’s waiting at his food station, I can tell that he knows it’s me. Occasionally, I’ve had a guest look out that window when he is there, and he always runs off when he sees a face other than mine. He even recognizes my car! If I am out in the evening and get home later than when he’s usually fed, he’ll show up on the front porch before I even get my coat off.
Mr. Stray appears to be healthy and content. I know that a steady diet of high-quality food, along with a safe and warm place to sleep, are the reasons he is doing so well. He has not had to venture away from my property, where so many dangers lurk, to find food. He hasn’t had to spend nights unprotected from the snow and rain.
I still hope that someday I’ll be able to pet him. I’d like him to feel the touch of loving hands, and to be happy and relaxed enough to purr.
Realistically, that may not ever happen. Like so many things in life, I can’t control the outcome of my efforts. All I can do is to feed him, to keep him as safe and comfortable as possible, and to keep talking to him. If this results in my being able to pet him eventually, I will be thrilled. If it doesn’t, I still have the satisfaction of knowing that I helped him. Eleven years is a long time for a feral cat to survive; I doubt if Mr. Stray would have made it without me.
Living with Wildlife
When we first settled into our cabin in the forest, I began keeping a journal of wildlife sightings. I recorded the date and what I’d seen, for no reason other than, as a writer, I tend to write things down.
We knew we would be living with deer, but we had not expected elk. They are huge animals. They came single file along one of the deer trails, jumped over a low area of the fence, and grazed only a few yards from the house. The first time I saw a bull elk with a five-foot rack of antlers standing within a few yards of my window, I got chills.
The elk are alert to noise and movement. They get spooked more easily than the deer do and, when that happens, they crash off into the woods like bulldozers, trampling whatever’s in their path. Since they often arrive at sunset, we learned to turn off all the lights in the house while we watched them, so that they didn’t see us, and to hold Lucy so she wouldn’t bark.
Elk
In a few years my wildlife journal proved useful because I realized the animals follow the same cycle, season after season. It didn’t matter whether we’d had a frigid winter with a lot of precipitation, or a mild, dry one, the elk migrated through our property within a day or so of April sixth, on their way up the mountain where they spend the summer. They are usually here in the evenings or early in the morning, for two or three weeks.
This is Lucy after she rolled in elk poop.
She knows she’s about to get a bath.
They return in September. They do a lot of damage to my trees every time they come, especially the younger trees that we planted in our first years here. They strip the branches of leaves, reaching their heads seven or eight feet up to eat. They knock whole branches off the fir trees, and ruin big patches of bark when they rub their heads against the tree trunks. Despite all the damage, I’m always glad when they come, because I never tire of watching them.
Unfortunately, Lucy loves the smell of elk poop. When she finds a pile of it, she instantly flops down and rolls on it. Then she trots over to me with gooey black streaks on both sides of her neck and down her back, looking all pleased with herself as if to say, “Aren’t I lovely? Smell my new perfume!” Lucy gets a lot of baths during elk season. Daisy used to do the same thing.
Carl designed birdhouses and helped our grandkids build and hang them. We learned to distinguish between the tapping sounds of a flicker and those of a pileated woodpecker. Yellow goldfinches, Washington’s state bird, brighten the feeders. Their deep yellow feathers, accented with black, seem to glow in the sunlight.
The blue jays throw the most seed to the ground. Those jays have no table manners. They shake their heads as they peck the seed, sending more seed flying to the ground than what they eat. Fortunately, the mourning doves are ground feeders who come to clean up the mess. Of all the bird sounds, I like the coo, ah, coo-coo-coo of the mourning doves best.
Eagles, both golden and bald, come infrequently, so it’s always exciting to spot one. An occasional red-tailed hawk tries to use the feeders as a diner, preying on the small birds, but they know when a hawk is around, and they disappear until he leaves.
We came home after dark one night and spotted a porcupine waddling across the lawn. Another day, we saw two martens. Anne and I once saw a mountain beaver.
My journal proved useful in knowing when to fill my hummingbird feeder and hang it outside for the summer. Like the elk, the hummingbirds follow a pattern and I can now predict within a day when I will see them. I find it interesting that the largest creatures I see on my property and the smallest both follow some sort of internal clock that regulates when they migrate.
One day as I walked on my nature trail, a flurry of feathers exploded from the forest floor beside me. I got only a glimpse of the bird as it flew into the woods. It was the size of a chicken with coloration that made it blend perfectly with its habitat. I consulted my bird books and identified a ruffed grouse.
I saw it only once more that summer when I was walking, although I always watched carefully in that part of the woods. Then one afternoon I stood up from my desk to stretch, looked out my office window, and saw a ruffed grouse with a brood of chicks! She herded them along the edge of the tall grass. After they had gone a few feet, they all returned to their mother who spread her wings and gathered the chicks underneath. She sat still for about a minute before all the chicks emerged again and repeated the process of walking forward and then returning. I assumed it was a training exercise where the chicks were learning to explore on their own, but also being taught to return to Mom when she gave the signal.
Sometimes the deer get frisky. A group of five or six deer will jump in the air, kick up their heels, and race in circles. I call it the Dancing Deer Revue. The show usually lasts about fifteen minutes.
Cats aren’t the only ones who are curious.
The deer are curious. One day Molly was dozing in the warm grass while I watched her from the porch. A deer approached, her ears perked forward, and slowly stepped closer to Molly. The deer was so curious about the cat that she stayed when I stood up and aimed my camera at her. Molly clearly didn’t feel threatened; she calmly watched the deer move within two feet of her. When I took a photo, the shutter sound caused the deer to leave. I’ve watched deer try to sneak close to Mr. Stray, too, and they do the same thing at night with ’possums.
Birds can also be curious. My closest neighbor, Chris, raises peacocks, and when I was having a new roof put on the cabin, she called to say that the peacocks were curious about all the noise. Usually, my place is quiet, but the roofers were pounding and banging, and Chris said the peacocks kept trying to peek through the trees to see what was going on.
About an hour after Chris phoned, here came the Peacock Patrol: four males, one female, and one guinea hen. They rarely come in my yard, but they headed straight toward the cabin as if they came to call every day. They lined up in a row, parallel to the house, and stared at the roof. The roofing crew thought it was hilarious. The birds watched for a few minutes, then turned and marched back home with their curiosity satisfied.
Although I was not officially enrolled in a college course, I felt as if I was taking Wildlife 101 because each new bird or animal that I spotted sent me to the library or online to learn more. I made notes from my own observations, too, and when I chatted with people who lived nearby, the talk often turned to the forest critters. I learned many fascinating facts. For example, ruffed grouse grow comblike projections off the si
des of their toes in winter. These act as snowshoes, helping the grouse walk in snow.
The visiting peacocks
We often saw ’possums around the bird feeders at night. Their real name is opossum, but I’ve chosen to write the word the way most people pronounce it. I watched them climb the feeder post, using their prehensile tails for balance while they ate the seed. Prehensile tails can wrap around and grasp an object—a useful trait when you’re perched on the edge of a bird feeder, eating seeds. ’Possums are the only animal in North America to have pouches. Like the kangaroos in Australia, female ’possums carry their newborn in a pouch.
I like their pointed pink faces and their tiny pink paws, but when I mention ’possums to other people, I find that I am in the minority when I think they are cute. I have heard far too many roadkill jokes. It’s true that ’possums are not the most intelligent of animals. They move slowly, and when they see oncoming headlights, they freeze in place instead of running to safety. Even so, I feel a fondness for these creatures that most people consider ugly. To even things out, I included a rescued ’possum in Spy Cat, hoping I might encourage a few readers to be tolerant of them.
Using my bird books, I have tried to identify all of the guests at the feeders. The biggest of these are the band-tail pigeons, who arrived the first year in flocks of thirty or more. It was hard to count them because they moved around so much, but I got up to thirty-four one day and was fairly certain I had not counted any bird twice. Band-tails are slate gray, with a thin crest of white on top of their necks. The “band” in their name is a black stripe on the underside of their tails that shows when they are in flight.
My son-in-law, Kevin, calls them the B-29s, after the four-engine propeller-driven airplanes that the United States used in World War II and the Korean War. The B-29s were big, too, and gray, and loud. The first atomic bomb was dropped from a B-29.
The band-tail pigeons are the clowns in my yard, never failing to entertain me. They flap their wings noisily as they crowd onto the feeder, sitting on its roof as well as on the side perches. In their eagerness to get their portion, they even stand on top of each other! They flutter and flap, trying to keep their balance as they push each other off. Displaced pigeons fly to the house roof or the porch railing, rest a moment, and then return to jostle for position at the feeder.
Band-tail pigeons are wild, native birds and are not the same as the pigeons that are often seen in cities and parks. Those pigeons actually are rock doves and were imported from Europe. Band-tails are between fourteen and seventeen inches long and weigh about a pound. They sit high up in the trees—I often see them on the topmost branches of the conifers—where they make a low cooing sound. Band-tail pigeons are known to return to the same nest site each year. They mate for life and, in this part of the country, raise only one young per year.
One day I saw a newspaper article that announced a hunting season for band-tail pigeons, the first in many years. When I researched this, I learned that the band-tail pigeon population had been so severely reduced by hunting and by heavy harvesting of trees in the low-elevation forests that hunting them had been prohibited for many years. Now their numbers had increased, so the hunting ban had been lifted.
Band-tail pigeons are about a third of the size of a duck—hardly enough meat to be worth the trouble. I talked one day with a man who hunted them, and I asked how he cooked them. “Oh, I don’t eat them,” he said. “I leave the ones I shoot for the coyotes or other scavengers to find.”
It seems to me there are better ways to have target practice than killing birds.
The following summer, after band-tail hunting had been legal for a year, my flock was much smaller than before. Instead of three dozen band-tails at a time, I had only six or seven.
I worried that the band-tails would suffer the same fate that had befallen the passenger pigeons. In the early 1800s, there were an estimated three to five billion passenger pigeons in eastern North America. They were the most abundant bird species ever. Eyewitness accounts tell of flocks so large that they “blackened the sky” for hours as they flew over.
Due mostly to overhunting and to the clearing of forests, passenger pigeons are now extinct. The last known passenger pigeon in the wild was shot in 1900. The last one in captivity died fourteen years later in the Cincinnati Zoo.
Passenger pigeons had lovely red breasts and long tail feathers. They were once our most common bird, but we will never again see one alive.
I wrote to the State Fish and Wildlife Department, the agency that decides hunting regulations, and told them about the swiftly declining band-tail population in my area. I requested that these birds be protected again, with a ban on hunting them. That didn’t happen, but the state does limit how many band-tails can be killed each year. (The hunting guides never use the word killed. They say harvested.) Now the numbers remain fairly stable from year to year, so I’m hopeful that the band-tails will be around for a long, long time.
I also enjoy watching the little juncos as they go about their bird business. One day I saw one of them pecking at the carpet square that Mr. Stray’s food sits on. I thought it was eating dried bits of spilled cat food. Then I saw that the junco was tearing out tiny tufts of carpet fiber and using them to build a nest.
I wanted to help with this effort, so I brushed Lucy and Molly, and put their fur out on the porch. The juncos immediately took it for nesting material. A friend puts dryer lint out for the birds, but I have more pet fur than dryer lint. I brush the animals most days anyway; when it’s nesting time, I toss the excess fur outside.
The juncos are a busy bunch, including the one I call Yo-Yo Bird. For the last two springs, while the rest of the juncos are building their nests, this one bird flies up from a shrub to the top of a garage window and back down, a distance of about four feet. He does it over and over, all day long, from the same branch on the bush to the same spot on the window molding. While the other juncos collect materials and construct nests, this one simply goes up and down like a yo-yo.
That junco resembles a few people I know who rush around doing trivial chores but never accomplishing anything.
My favorite birds are the California quail. I currently have a covey of five who live in a brush pile at the back of my property. Several times daily they trot single file toward the bird feeder that’s nearest my back porch. The males have a distinctive black topknot that bobs up and down as they scratch for seed. The females’ topknot is smaller, and their coloring is not as vivid.
Most quail coveys are much larger than mine, averaging around fifty birds. The quail watch out for each other. When one finds a source of food, it usually calls to the rest, to share the bounty. A “guard” often perches in a high spot to watch for predators while the rest of the birds eat. If it perceives danger, it warns the others. California quail communicate with fourteen different calls.
The first snow after we lived in the cabin brought surprises. When I walked down the driveway to get the morning paper, I found lots of animal tracks, including rabbit tracks which led to a secluded den that I hadn’t known existed, in a fallen tree. Deer tracks crisscrossed the driveway, and there were some small tracks that I did not recognize.
Deer in the snow
I bought a book that identified various animal tracks and consulted it often through the years. The tracks that I didn’t recognize that first morning in the snow turned out to be mice! Even the birds leave tracks in the snow. Bird tracks are usually in pairs, because the birds don’t walk, they hop.
One summer the deer began to look scruffy. Soon they had big bald patches, where their fur had fallen out. I found clumps of their fur on the ground, and I watched them scratch at themselves with their hind hooves, the way a dog will scratch at a flea bite. Their condition got worse and worse as the summer progressed.
I contacted the wildlife department and learned that the herd had deer hair-loss syndrome. Most of western Washington’s blacktail deer population was afflicted that year. Deer ha
ir-loss syndrome is caused by lice and it impacts the animal’s overall health, often getting so severe that the deer dies.
I asked if there was any medication to cure it. I thought perhaps I could put pills in apples and leave them out for the deer to eat. I was told that the only remedy had to be injected, which made it impossible for wild deer.
One fawn had a particularly bad case. I watched helplessly as the fawn lost more and more hair and clearly became weaker. We had a cold spell, and the fawn was nearly bald. One day I realized I had not seen the fawn in over a week. It never came again; I’m sure it died of the hair-loss syndrome.
The deer often bed down in the tall grass behind my house to bask in the sun and chew their cuds. One summer day, the year after the hair-loss problem, I saw a large doe walk to a sunny spot and settle into the grass. Usually, two or three deer rest together, but this one was by herself.
I was in my office, writing, and periodically I glanced out the window to see if she was still there. She was. After a couple of hours had passed, I looked out just as she stood up—only she was no longer alone. Twin fawns on wobbly legs stood beside her! The doe washed her babies, and they began to nurse.
The deer is napping in front of my house,
next to my driveway.
They were much smaller than the fawns we’d seen in previous years, less than two feet tall, and frail looking. Maybe they were so tiny because they were twins or perhaps it was only because they were newborns. After the mother deer finished nursing them, she led them into the woods and I didn’t see them again for two weeks. By then, they had doubled in size.
Fawns are kept hidden when they’re tiny. Because they are earth-colored, with white spots that look like dappled light, they are hard to see when they’re curled in a tight ball, under a low-growing plant. I was fortunate to have seen these when they were so small.
