Wild Life

If you are a regular reader of this blog you will know that I pay attention to, and sometimes write about, birds that live around us, and it is true that their feathered presence and bright activities have always been engaging to me. In fact, just starting to write this post reminded me of the sharp-shinned hawk I found years ago on the path at the lower end of our property. It was lying there on its back, small talons curled tightly, and no mark on it to show how it had died. I marvelled at its delicate beauty and feathered lightness in my hand.

But this post is not about birds, it’s about mammals, the wild ones that frequent our property. The largest, and in some respects the peskiest, are the white-tailed deer. Before we went away to Istanbul they discovered my vegetable gardens and harvested whatever suited their taste. They browsed the yew just below our deck every winter and severely trimmed the euonymus by the back door. They are fond of tulips and the only way to grow them here is to put little cages over the bulbs in the early spring to keep their leaves from being chewed off by white-tailed grazers. Our neighbours, S&S, erected an eight-foot fence around their vegetable garden, but their shrubs and bushes are still vulnerable in winter when the deer stroll by, which they do with relative impunity.

I last saw a deer here a couple of weeks ago when I took Dewi, who was here for a sleepover, out the lane for his evening walk. While he was sniffing dead goldenrod and clumps of snow I looked back toward the house and saw the elegant shape of a large doe stepping across the driveway and heading through the path to our neighbours'. And yesterday morning, when I checked the feeder in the magnolia bush, I saw that it was pretty much empty and the hoofprints in the snow told me that one of our friendly deer had figured out how to bump the seeds out of it and munch them on the ground.
Another feeder visitor is a quick little red squirrel. It is quite different, I think, from the large grey characters that Jon Eben contends with in St. Catharines with their languid city ways that border on domesticity and their skill at getting past the most creative obstacles to clean out the bird feeders. My red squirrel is a wild creature, more modest in appetite, with stashes of spruce cones under the edges of granite boulders and in tree root crevices, and I have no objection to its helping itself to some seeds now and again. It scolds us from bare branches, moves with a rust-coloured and fluid grace up and over and around our rocks and trees, and hangs from the suet cage while it nibbles its snacks.

There are snowshoe hares as well, though I more often see their tracks than their beings. Early last winter I watched one make its way down the slope next to the house, crouching under our pine trees, probably feeding, though they usually eat around dawn and dusk. What struck me then was the mottling of its coat, the white beginning to predominate, but the grey-brown still very much there as the season changed from fall to winter. Driving to the airport very early on the morning of the 3rd we saw a pure white one just beyond our road, perfectly matching the snow that had fallen that night. It’s an amazing feat, I think, this changing of colour to match the season, and I still puzzle about how such a feature could have evolved (though I guess without it I’d have no snowshoe hares to look at).

Of course there are also chipmunks, likely hibernating now, raccoons, though they are less in evidence since I’ve put a stronger bungee cord on the green bin, and deer mice, whose tracks I see in the snow and keep hoping they will stay outside the house since I don’t love catching them in traps. I know that there are foxes around, and others talk of coyotes, but I haven’t seen either yet, though I would love to. I’ll keep watching, however, and I’ll keep you posted – you can count on it!