Tamed and Untamed

by Sy Montgomery

  I have great respect for the fish and game departments, and I’m grateful for a wealth of material from David Stainbrook, the deer and moose project leader from the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, who generously sent me links to various publications showing the damage we can cause by feeding wildlife. According to these publications, winter feeding causes deer to congregate, which may spread diseases, and also to run across roads where they are hit by cars. But most important, deer adjust their digestive systems for winter and are set for diets high in fiber but low in carbohydrates, so the sudden introduction of large amounts of foods low in fiber and high in carbohydrates, such as corn and other grains, seriously disables their digestion and can kill them. In New Hampshire, for instance, the rumens of a group of dead deer were stuffed with apples, corn, and hay. These animals probably died within hours, although others might live for a month or so while some might be permanently compromised. There is no treatment.

  For years I’ve fed deer with some success, but if potential deer feeders knew what it took to do this, the difficulties alone might discourage them, never mind potential consequences to the deer.

  For one thing, the timing is tricky. One must start feeding before the deer’s digestive systems are completely in winter mode but after the end of hunting season because attracting them to food would expose them, and these dates don’t always coincide. One also must recognize the deer as individuals so that one can know if new deer are joining, and must monitor their droppings for diarrhea or other abnormalities and also clean up the droppings to lessen the risk of disease. One cannot just leave a large pile of food and let it go at that—one must know how many deer are eating and put out a corresponding number of moderate piles, always on clean snow, often twice a day, which means that from November to April one can’t leave home from for more than a few hours. And one must be prepared for heavy expense that isn’t tax deductible. My deer feeding costs about $1,000 a year.

  But the worst part is the uncertainty. In 2013 I fed fifteen deer until April 2. The snow was melting and grass had appeared, and the usual deer were in our field grazing. Then I noticed five more deer, a new group, whose digestive systems were almost certainly in full winter mode and could be harmed by a new diet. They had come for the grass. The year I planted oats, fifty-five deer showed up together on the day the oats sprouted and not an oat remained—but the corn I’d put out was already in place. At least no deer would get much, and I couldn’t keep watch all night, but the worry was obsessive just the same. The next day deer were eating grass where snow had newly melted, and none came for the corn, although three of them thought about it.

  My reward for this—staying home for five months; dragging heavy buckets over icy, rough terrain in any weather; scraping up deer droppings; and impoverishing myself—comes in the spring when I see from a window the same deer I saw in the fall. Few would find this sufficiently rewarding, especially if the winter had been moderate, in which case they’d see those deer anyway. I’ve been asked by readers and by those involved with fish and game departments to discourage people from feeding deer, and if this doesn’t do it, I’d say that except for the most devoted wildlife helpers, it can’t be done.

  Which brings us to the question of why help wildlife anyway? I do it because we’re so happy to damage them. We destroy their ecosystems to build houses, we hunt them just for pleasure, and we kill them with our cars when they try to cross the roads. If during a harsh winter I can help a little in a responsible manner, whereby the same deer who came in the fall are there in the spring to hide their fawns in the grass on my field, I feel I’ve done some good.

  The Lion

  — Liz —

  We know less about the minds of animals than we know about their habits, and the better we understand this, the deeper their mysteries seem. The truth of this was demonstrated by a lion and Katy Payne, a researcher at the Bioacoustics Research Program at Cornell University who, as mentioned in an earlier essay, discovered that elephants make infrasound.

  Having spent most of her life studying wildlife, especially whales and elephants, Katy is more than familiar with the natural world. Her experience described here took place when she was in Namibia, hoping to record the roars of a lioness who had been on the far side of a fence that circled the tourist area of Etosha National Park. The lioness wasn’t in view at the time, but she’d been roaring, and Katy thought she’d roar again during the night. So with a recorder in hand, Katy was in a sleeping bag inside the fence, lying on her stomach, waiting.

  But instead of the lioness, an enormous lion with a yellow mane walked up to the fence. Katy had noticed a hole in the fence, and so had the lion. The hole was patched, but only with chicken wire, and he sat down right in front of it.

  Katy describes this adventure in her fascinating book, Silent Thunder: In the Presence of Elephants, from which I’ll quote to recount the tale. Her account, however astonishing, is true. The lion wanted to look at her. He may not have known what the sleeping bag was, or he may have seen that a human was in it and wanted to know if she was easy prey. As he sat down he stared at her face, perhaps wondering what to do next. Stretching her back to look up at him, she propped herself on her elbows and met his eyes.

  If the lion chose to reach her, he could. She knew if she moved he might scoop her through the hole in the fence with his huge, powerful paw. So she stayed still and kept looking at his eyes, although soon enough her back and arms were getting pins and needles.

  The lion also sat quietly. He was “relaxed and alert,” she says. The moon was up and creeping higher, “lighting the hair on his shoulders, his whiskers, and the long hairs of the mane around his face.”

  After a while she saw him panting mildly as a long stream of drool slid off his tongue. On moonlit nights lions often go hungry because their intended prey can see them. And there was Katy, lying still, within easy reach, a satisfying meal if he didn’t have to share it. Why didn’t he reach through the wire and grab her?

  Katy says he had acknowledged that she wasn’t food. But she certainly made him think of eating, so was he figuring out how best to grab her and drag her through the fence? It would seem, for whatever reason, that he didn’t want to, or not then.

  The night passed slowly. Katy didn’t move. Instead, she watched the lion’s eyes as the moon crept toward the zenith. At first its light shone in her face, but as it crossed the sky its light came from behind her and shone on the lion. Then she could see him in detail. “His eyes,” she says “were exquisite. Brown and gold. Neither of us blinked.”

  It’s hard to imagine holding a painfully uncomfortable position for six or seven hours, but by the time the moon reflected in the lion’s eyes, Katy had done this. She never shifted her position and her gaze never faltered, nor did the lion’s. Etosha Park abounds with other animals, and some must have been rustling in the bushes as the hours went by, but even the rustles didn’t distract the lion. He kept looking into Katy’s eyes while she looked into his.

  As the moon went down, the sky grew light behind Katy and dark behind the lion. Her shadow fell on him. And as the moon sank lower, the sky grew darker. The ache in her arms and her back must have seemed intolerable—by then she hadn’t moved for almost twelve hours—but still she didn’t take her eyes from the lion’s.

  As the moon was sinking the sky turned slightly gray. Morning was coming. The lion stood up, stretched himself thoroughly, and yawned. Giving Katie a parting glance, he turned his back and walked off in the bushes. Katie stood up, too, and as she was leaving she heard a terrible scream. She looked through the fence. The lion had killed a kudu.

  Etosha lions were known for killing people. During the struggle for Namibian independence, their man-eating habits were blamed for keeping the revolutionary soldiers stationed in Angola from entering Namibia from the north. So if man eating was acceptable to that lion population, why didn’t this lion eat Katy?

/>   While contemplating her for those long, uninterrupted hours, he was learning important things about her. Perhaps she seemed balanced like himself, not panicked like a kudu, but what does this mean? That someone must act like prey to become prey? Unless you’re angry, and he wasn’t, you don’t just casually kill those you know and eat them—you interact with them in an acceptable manner.

  Surely Katy’s demeanor seemed important. She must have seemed unafraid, and like the lion in an earlier essay who roared at the setting sun, she was lying on her stomach, propped on her elbows, watching with concentration just as the sun-watching lion had done. Was Katy doing what a lion might do when watching something? So did the lion watching her think she was like him?

  There’s another possibility. A number of studies, including studies done by the British Psychological Society, show that looking into another person’s eyes for just a few minutes can have important consequences, from discomfort and hallucinations to falling in love. In any case, it always has consequences, usually positive ones, so it’s recommended as therapy for couples with marital problems and also is used for meditation.

  In most of these studies the participants sat close together, and in some their foreheads were touching. This was not the case with Katy and the lion, who were at least ten feet apart. And it’s hard to imagine falling in love with a hungry, drooling lion who is staring at you.

  But what about the lion? A study by Japanese scientists showed that our brains synchronize during mutual staring. After a few minutes both people begin to blink at the same time, as if controlled by the same brain. So while staring for hours into Katy’s eyes, did the lion experience a sense of oneness? It seemed to Katy that he might have. “We were both in the same place,” she said.

  The sun changed this, and no wonder. For those who live in the natural world, the life-changing times are sunset and sunrise. The lion went off to kill a kudu and Katy went back to her camp with her story. Both resumed their normal lives and that was that.

  I heard a similar account of a woman who was backpacking alone in cougar country when a cougar jumped on her from behind. She fell face down but managed to turn over with her backpack between her and the cougar, who lay on top of her. She looked into his eyes as Katy had looked into the lion’s, and may also have spoken to him in quiet tones. At any rate, after a long time while he met her eyes, he, too, might have felt respect and perhaps connection. At last he stood up and left.

  If I had been in Katy’s situation, I’d be dried-up lion scat by now because the last thing I’d want to look at would be a lion’s gleaming eyes. So perhaps the best way to view an animal is to view it as a person in a different form. Our species is just one among 8.7 million others. How many of these can we name? How many do we know or understand? It could be hard to find an animal who would let us stare into his eyes, but if we could (but hopefully not an apex predator), we’d learn more about the minds of those with whom we share our world.

  Hyraxes

  — Liz —

  Sy and I recently went to Tanzania for a wildlife safari. We traveled across the Serengeti to see the wildebeest migration, which is one of the wonders of the world. We were with Richard D. Estes, the foremost wildebeest scientist, and we saw some amazing sights, not the least of which was thousands of herds of wildebeests, maybe fifty to a hundred in every herd, all traveling together, heads low, tails flicking, as far as the eye could see. They were slowly walking to Kenya where they hoped to find green grass.

  Our trip had a scientific purpose, but we didn’t deny ourselves a little wildlife tourism, whereby you ride around in a vehicle looking out the window, stopping when an animal appears, soon moving on to see another animal. Thus it’s somewhat like sitting on a sofa, turning the pages of a coffee-table book. On the first page you see an elephant, on the next a vulture, on the third a giraffe—on and on, day after day. Such safaris are for viewing animals, not for understanding them, and only if someone like Dick Estes is with you can you do both. We saw thousands of animals. We learned from Dick how wildebeests transformed much of Africa, creating and preserving the open savannas by traveling over them and grazing, and we saw for ourselves how this was being accomplished.

  I was fascinated with wildebeests. I also became fascinated with hyraxes (hyrax is pronounced HIGH-rax), but I hadn’t known much about them until the vehicle we were using broke down and needed repair. That day we stayed at a safari camp in a somewhat forested area that happened to be hyrax habitat, so I watched these animals all day.

  What is a hyrax? It’s a primitive little mammal sometimes called a coney, found across much of Africa and the Middle East. The ones I saw were rock hyraxes, about eighteen inches long with short legs, short tails, and round, plump bodies covered with gray fur. They had tusks like elephants, but the tusks were small and hardly showed. Otherwise their faces were something like a squirrel’s. They ate leaves and grass, which they bit from the stems by twisting their heads to use their molars. And because they were primitive mammals, their thermal regulation was underdeveloped, so despite their thick fur, they needed the sun.

  The camp where I watched them was on high ground (maybe eight thousand feet), so the nights were cold and little groups of them had cuddled together in sheltered places. When the sun was up, they spread out to open places where they lay on their sides and exposed their white bellies to the sun’s warmth.

  Hyraxes are mentioned in the Bible (Leviticus 11), where God instructs Moses and Aaron to tell the Israelites that “the hyrax though it chews the cud does not have a divided hoof: it is unclean for you.” Hyraxes don’t chew the cud, so one wonders why God thought they did, but his view of their paws was accurate, as these are something like our feet—flat and relatively long, with toes and a heel. Hyraxes are said to be the closest living relatives of elephants and are equally intelligent or nearly so.

  Soon I was so taken with hyraxes that I longed to have one as a pet. I loved the careful attention they paid to their surroundings, interested but unexcited. I loved the way they ate, chewing slowly and thoughtfully. I loved the way they related to one another, casually aware but not particularly engaged, as if they knew and trusted one another. Elephants act this way, too, if no one is bothering them, and who wouldn’t want a small, furry creature who behaved like an elephant as a pet? I would never catch a wild animal to keep as a pet, of course—removing him from friends and family and the ecosystem he understood so he could spend the rest of his life in a cage—so I will content myself by relishing the knowledge that hyraxes once ruled the world.

  This was in the Eocene epoch, the age of hyraxes. As the dominant group, they spread through Africa, the Near East, Asia, and most of Europe. Their numbers included carnivores and herbivores—some enormous, some midsize, and some small. Some became aquatic in the manner of beavers, and some of these gave rise to elephants and manatees, or so it’s said. And even today, except for their size and appearance, modern hyraxes can remind one of elephants, tusks and all, in the way they behave when at peace by themselves.

  As for our safari, despite the lions, the wildebeests, the crocodiles, and the vultures, if hyraxes were all I’d seen, just to have them as a memory would have made the trip worthwhile.

  Christmas Ermine

  — Sy —

  Every Christmas, for the holiday, I bring our flock of hens a brimming bowl of hot popped corn for breakfast. It is greeted with great enthusiasm. But one Christmas morning was different. I opened the door to their coop and found one hen lying dead on the wood shavings carpeting the floor. Everyone was subdued.

  Some of our hens were elderly at the time. It was possible, I thought, that she had just keeled over from her perch from old age. I reached down to pick her up by the legs to examine her. Her head was wedged into a small hole in the corner. But I couldn’t lift her. Something—or someone—had a hold of her head.

  I pulled and pulled, and finally yanked my chicken free.
The next second, out from the hole popped a white face less than an inch wide with a bright pink nose and coal-black eyes burning with intensity. It stared directly into my eyes. It was an ermine. I had never seen one before. Instantly my sorrow was replaced with wonder.

  The tiny animal before me was gorgeous. Its fur was the purest white I had ever seen, whiter than snow or cloud or sea foam—so white it seemed to glow, like the raiment of an angel. It’s easy to see why kings (and even Saint Nicholas) trimmed their robes in ermine fur. But even more impressive was its gaze, a look so bold and fearless that it took my breath away. Here was a creature the length of my hand, who weighed little more than a handful of coins, but who had come out of its hole expressly to challenge a monster who was a thousand times its size. What are you doing with my chicken? those coal eyes said to me. Give it back!

  Of course, I had been thinking it was my chicken. I had raised her from an egg-shaped chick from the time she was two days old. Our chicks grow up in my home office. They snuggle in my sweater and perch on my shoulders as I write; when they grow older, they follow me around outside. They come running to me when I call. I love each one, and I loved the hen who lay dead in my arms. Her body was still warm. But I could feel no animosity as I faced the one who had killed her. I was gobsmacked.