Tag: wildlife

April 9, 2010

Asphalt and wildness

What was that just ahead, in that puddle?

Walking up the paved path, I looked hard, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. It had been raining hard for two days, and gusty. Anything light enough to be caught by the wind could have blown about and settled here. A couple of plastic bags, perhaps.

On a pond, I would have recognized the shapes and colors. Here, though, in just a few inches of water, at the intersection of heavily traveled asphalt footpaths on a university campus?

Ducks. A pair of mallards, heads tucked under wings.

I walked past, went thirty yards, then came back. A few feet away, I squatted down to look more closely. Noticing me, the ducks lifted their heads and quacked. As soon as I stood and moved off a few paces, they settled back into their afternoon nap.

Something about the scene felt strange.

In part, it was aesthetic prejudice, the same kind of distaste I feel when I hear of bears habituated to pawing their way through landfills. In my imagination, wild ducks paddle along river banks and dabble among cattails. They don’t belong in asphalt-bordered puddles.

But something else bothered me, too. The mallards were completely unconcerned by the proximity of humans. Like zoo animals, they seemed to have lost their wildness.

What do we mean, though, when we say that creatures are “wild?”

Do we mean that they are wary of humans? That they see us as potential predators? Or, if large and carnivorous, as potential prey? Might there be a better, less anthropocentric, measure?

Are creatures who spend their lives in environments of human artifice—and who become accustomed to us in the process—still “wild?”

I wonder whether animals can feel it when their wildness slips away. I wonder whether they sense, as some humans do, that it leaves in its wake a forgetfulness—about who we are and where we belong.

And I wonder if wildness is ever truly driven out of any of us, or if it merely slumbers.

April 1, 2010

Springtime and a hunter’s debts

The snow is almost gone from our yard already. Here, facing northwest across the Winooski Valley, an April without white stuff on the ground is a rare gift.

Soon, crocuses will be in bloom. We’ll be planting peas and salad greens. And the world will be buzzing with life.

The spring peepers, returned from the mud, will begin their chirping chorus in the old beaver pond near our house. The ruffed grouse who have spent the winter feeding on aspen buds and eluding raptors will be drumming, mating, and laying eggs. And the largest of our forest-dwelling neighbors will be on the move.

Every spring, we find moose tracks by the pond. The great, dark animals come down from the hills, drawn to wetlands where they—still wearing thick winter coats—can find relief from the heat. The thermometer is supposed to hit 75 this weekend. With no leaves on the trees yet, shade can only be found among the conifers.

If we’re lucky, we find bear tracks, too. Emerging from hibernation, they’re on the lookout for food. Time for us to take the birdfeeders down, lest we once again wake at midnight to the sounds of a bruin snuffling around on the back porch.

In this lush, bustling time of year, I take pleasure in seeing our wild neighbors and signs of their passage.

On seeing deer or deer tracks, I might think briefly of autumn, of the way dry, frosty leaves crunch under a whitetail’s hooves.

Mostly, though—as I did before my hunting days—I am just grateful to move among my fellow creatures, knowing that they are moving all around me. As I did before my hunting days, I feel indebted for the simple gift of their presence.

Bear-marked beech with backhoe, near a southern Vermont ski area

As I did before my hunting days, I sense the importance of protecting our neighbors’ homes—the highlands and the wetlands and the routes traveled by moose in between, the stands of beech where bears fatten themselves when the mast crop is good, the steep and rocky places where bobcats den—from greedy encroachment by too many of our homes and roads and economic enterprises.

Perhaps the only difference, now that I occasionally drag venison from these hills, is that I am indebted to these creatures and places in yet another way.

March 5, 2010

‘Gone killing’

Hunters and anglers, writes Marc Bekoff in Animals Matter, “often like to hang signs that say ‘Gone Fishin’’ or ‘Gone Huntin’.’ But what these slogans really mean is ‘Gone killing.’”

When I opposed hunting, I would—like Bekoff—have objected to the euphemisms. Even catch-and-release fishing, with its professed intent not to kill, often does.

Now that I hunt, though, what strikes me is simply that “gone killing” is a terribly inaccurate description of my experiences in the woods.

When I hunt deer, the creatures I see most often are small woodland birds, usually chickadees. If I’m lucky, a pileated woodpecker might land on a nearby tree trunk with a thwack, or a pair of ruffed grouse might scurry by in the brush. Typically, the biggest mammal I see is a red squirrel, hopping past or pausing to scold me.

Hunters do hope to kill now and then. Yet many of us go years without doing so. I recall talking with a man who was out in the woods, hunting with his son. He said he hadn’t shot a deer in over twenty years. He seemed perfectly content just being out there.

Even when animals do show up, often there isn’t any opportunity for a legal, ethical shot. And even when there is, hunters don’t always kill. Sometimes we let the moment pass.

On the rare occasions when I do shoot a deer, the killing itself takes mere seconds.

In short, killing isn’t what hunters do with most of their time in the field.

But, just for a moment, let’s imagine that Bekoff’s words were literally true—that all hunting entailed killing. If we were all subsistence hunters, dependent on the meat to keep our families alive through the winter, perhaps we’d be glad to know that we’d return from every outing with dinner in tow.

Even then, though, how would the certainty and the constant killing feel? What kind of experience would it be?

I’m not even sure what we’d call it. As one local hunter—a particularly experienced and skilled outdoorsman—once put it after a long, unsuccessful deer season, “That’s why they call it ‘hunting,’ not ‘finding.’”

Maybe next time I head to the woods, I’ll hang a sign: “Gone looking, listening, and birdwatching—and, just possibly, killing.”

January 6, 2010

Feathers in the snow

First, a downy tuft. Then a barred tail feather. I scanned the path ahead and the woods to either side. Usually, when I find a few grouse feathers, there are more nearby, then more, then the spot where it happened.

This time, I did find more feathers, perhaps a couple dozen. But no epicenter.

One tail feather, caught a few feet off the ground among the snow-laden branches of a hemlock sapling, suggested a dramatic scene: a hawk or owl swooping, taking its prey on the wing—or off a branch above—and carrying it off for dinner. That’s how most ruffed grouse go, snatched by a raptor.

I sympathize with both hungry predator and wary prey, and am awed by both: the powerful strike of one bird, the subtle camouflage and evasive maneuvers of the other.

These kinds of predatory encounters happen all the time—birds, bugs, fish, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals eating each other constantly. Yet, in our daily lives, we rarely see such nutritional transactions. And in our animated films—pale, distorted parables of nature that they are—animals rarely eat; miraculously, predators and prey become buddies.

It’s easy to forget about all the eating. Like the raptor swooping overhead, prey in talons, it hardly touches the ground of our consciousness.

When our thoughts do turn to nature and eating and humans, we know where we stand. At the top. You’ve probably seen the slogan on T-shirts and bumper stickers: “I Didn’t Claw My Way to the Top of the Food Chain to Eat Vegetables.”

It’s quite a fantasy—linear, neatly avoiding the cyclical truth of our own mortality. For we, too, are part of nature. We’re like the large carnivores who “in the end,” as Paul Shepard once put it, “are pursued by microbes, fungi, and plant roots.”

If you stop to think about it, there’s beauty here. The nutrients of our bodies becoming part of field, forest, and stream. Perhaps part of grouse or hawk, or drawn up into the stem and needles of the small hemlock where the grouse feather alights.

Omnivorous predator though I am, I think the T-shirt should read: “I Clawed and Clawed But Couldn’t Escape the Food Web – Soon I’ll Be Feeding Vegetables.”