nature – JT McKenna Writes

Nature’s “Mucklers” Extraordinaire

I begin the day with a glance out my bedroom window to take measure of the present degree of voraciousness of “my” wild birds and small rodents. When I note that all four of the bird feeders are empty after a mere day and a half, I slump in defeat.

If heavier animals climb on this type of feeder, their weight causes the dispenser to be closed off; squirrels defy by hanging by the tail above.

I don’t even know why I should have been hopeful; yesterday, too, began with distressing evidence of looting à la Peter Rabbit. I now have good reason to suspect either rabbits or voles (yes, that’s right — voles, mutualistic brethren of the mole) as the perpetrators who decimated in one day all the early spring growth of my newest perennials. Either way — rabbit or vole — my joyful anticipation of pinks, purples, and yellows has been scotched by an as-yet unidentified marauding vegetarian under the cover of darkness.

While I bemoaned my loss, muttering personally satisfying things like little fuckers, Bowie exploited my inattention by hopping up onto one of my raised beds and digging up a corner’s worth of fall-planted garlic. Fortunately for him, he knew to spit it out; unfortunately for me, the garlic he got was in minced form.)

With regard to the bird feeders, I lack the energy to single out any one culprit — like a mother with too many children or a teacher on a Friday afternoon, it’s much simpler to hold the entire brood responsible. I rap on the window and issue an appropriately captious barb. A handful of foraging juncos takes immediate flight, as does a cardinal. Following their lead is a chickadee; zipping in a tight arc to land higher up in the spruce tree, the stalwart little warrior no doubt is countering with his own retort. He always has the last word. It takes me opening the window and smacking the siding with my open palm to get a response from the faction of squawky redwing blackbirds. They’re slow to clear out, and their abrasive utterances fade even more gradually.

It all has me remembering conversations I used to have when my father-in-law was alive. Knowing how much of a rule follower I was, he took pleasure in scandalizing me with stories of his youth in which he flouted authority. No doubt his tenth grade teachers broke into jubilant jitterbug gyrations the day he announced — for real this time — I’m never coming back. And he didn’t. Long before he made his consequential declaration, however, “Big George” was abrading what he deemed society’s suffocating strictures. He was forever “muckling” things, like cigarettes and “adult” magazines from various of the City of Lynn’s corner stores, unsupervised wine at St. Mary’s where he was an altar boy, occasional slugs from his father’s bottles of scotch.

“Muckle” was one of his favorite things to do. Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve never been able to assay the veracity of this word that was so important to my father-in-law, even though its meaning was clear to me from its earliest usage. Big George always said it with such gusto — the word would nigh detonate from the side of his mouth, riding across a loose bed of gravel. His eyes bespoke the remembered pleasure of the act.

I lean back inside, muttering my unoriginal little fuckers. Right now, they’re all little fuckers — the rabbits, the deer (don’t even get me started!), the voles, the moles, the squirrels and chipmunks, the blackbirds. I like the juncos and chickadees and cardinals. They play by the rules, so I don’t assign them to the depraved Pack of Pilferers and Irritants.

In appearance, this space looks like the outcome of an air-to-surface strafing. (I’m confident that all fall-planted bulbs have been extricated with clinical precision.)

At day’s end, as I coax my brain to float drowsily upon pre-slumber thoughts, I ponder the possible exploits of tonight’s creatures. Will the skunks be competing with the moles, raking the ground for grubs (they’re more plentiful this year now that I suspended my lawn service)? Will the rabbits shift their frisking about and foraging to another part of the yard, freezing — as ever — at the first sign of nocturnal predation?

Does everyone yearn for a personal oasis, I wonder. Even city dwellers with room enough only for a pot or two. . . of geraniums? Fountain grass? I’m daunted by the challenges that landscape and vegetable gardening brings. Truth be told, homeownership in general. Despite (by and large) a lifetime of rural living, it doesn’t come naturally to me. Most days I feel as if I’m engaged in a nonstop game of Whac-a-mole (befittingly), one in which I’m perpetually losing. There’s something reassuring about the madness, however. If I woke up tomorrow and failed to discern signs of plunder or strained my ears, hearing nothing but silence suggestive of abandonment by the opposition; the kinetic deprivation could be read as a chilling omen. . . existentially.

Before I spiral too deeply into apocalyptic thought, I’ll pull back in order to reflect on the upside of all this earnest pursuit to have our needs met. You know, the whole food chain thing. The circle of life. Granted, when my remedies result in me spending gobs of money on things like neem oil (to keep insects from destroying my cabbage and lettuce plants), chicken wire (to block rabbit devastation of just about every plant. . . except garlic), high fencing (to keep deer out), compost, fertilizer, trichlorfon (to kill grubs), etc., not only does it make me much poorer in the wallet, but it has a way of forcing me to cast a sobering look at what all I’m doing. Is that sweet, delicious tomato really worth the small fortune of investment? (Last September I would have answered with a resounding, yes!) And, aren’t I just tipping my hand and showing my arrogance when I say, You, cutie pie chickadee, and you, junco, are okay; you can occupy “my space”. But you, chonky squirrel, and you, clacky blackbird, are not welcome?

Besides which, rivalry is good. It keeps us on our toes. Bring it! I say.

These Are the Times That Try Homeowners’ Souls

Right before I canceled my contract with my pest service, the technician — a very friendly and helpful sort — gave me his earnest thoughts about how to resolve my problem with moles.

“You near any fresh water here?”

“Ah-huh. Right at the back edge of the property there’s a stream.”

Rudy (as I’ll call the technician, having forgotten his real name and having deleted his equally earnest report, a report that used phrases such as “moderate activity at bait station” and “no signs of entry into home”) wagged his head in a slow figure eight, tsk-tsking and clucking. He didn’t seem happy to hear about my proximity to water. “Moles are tricky. They don’t like our bait.” Pausing, he offered, “A pellet gun should take care of the problem.”

Subsequent online searches seemed to echo Rudy’s comments. Don’t waste your money on deterrents, I heard over and over by YouTube homeowners with this same problem. With growing alarm, I started to see that the favored means of eradication — the most effective — fell into two camps: either I was going to have to shoot the varmints or invest in spring-loaded, scissor-jawed traps that you set along their tunnels. I’ll spare you the technicalities of how they work, but knowing that the primary feature is a scissor action, any further elaboration is overkill. (Get it?)

It all presents me with a real quandary, and I don’t know how I will proceed. Selling my home is not a viable solution to my mole problem. Nor is any concession of defeat. I hear that one effective way to invite moles to leave your property is by encouraging hawks and owls to visit more regularly, something that I am loathe to do because I fear they might ignore any loudly issued injunction against harassing my small bird friends.

To my great surprise (and internal disgust), I’ve found myself wondering, how realistic is it to shoot a mole in the dark? (I texted my brother Bob with the question, also asking, do I need a gun license to own/operate a pellet gun? Bob became alarmed.)

Verging on desperation, I find a middle ground solution the most acceptable*. I’ll buy the trap, set the trap, and if it becomes triggered, I’ll call over my neighbor Charlie. With appropriate theatrical flourishes, I’ll suggest that we have encountered the times that try homeowners’ souls, and that tyranny of lawn is not easily conquered. Charlie is a good patriot. . . er, neighbor, and will take up the cause, I’m sure.

*(I can’t see myself even going the “death trap” route. I get as far as imagining pushing the “scissors” through to the tunnel, and I’m overcome with a sense of betrayal.)

I’m Giving Yellowstone Another Chance

It isn’t the first time I’ve come across this term — flyover country — but I have to pause and really think about its meaning. When I do that, I realize that it’s not a very flattering descriptor; in fact, it can be seen as dismissive, even disrespectful, as if the spaces labeled as such are somehow insignificant, not worthy of visiting.

And that’s what its meaning suggests. Here’s the surprising thing, though — when the term was first used, in 1980 (according to the Oxford Dictionary), it was in the context of self-identification. The writer Thomas McGuane, a native Michigander, portrayed his adopted state of Montana as “flyover country” in an Esquire article about landscape artist Russell Chatham, fellow Montanan.

It is unlikely that McGuane foresaw how durable his expression would become, but he was earnest in his desire to convey a particular sentiment representative of people living in the heartland. And he should know. He grew up in Michigan, was educated there, and despite regular sojourns to each coast’s urban centers, has made Montana his home for several decades. He has spent a lifetime observing not just people, but nature. I’m not prepared to say that McGuane’s cynicism developed after he turned from writing novels to writing screenplays for Hollywood, but it can be said that his reverence for nature’s gifts has been a constant. That it would be McGuane whose name will be forever tethered to a pejorative seems unfortunate.

For ten years I’ve regularly done the loooong coast-to-coast flight in order to visit my younger daughter, who lives in Portland, Oregon. On most occasions I take the window seat; it allows me to periodically break up the monotony by studying the landscape below. The middle areas of the country that seem particularly devoid of concentrated activity always excite a sense of wonder — what would it be like to live in this part of the country? When I observe a land surface that has the appearance of an enormous, fleecy blanket draped over a mysterious jumble of objects of varying sizes, I’m curious, how close is the nearest home? The nearest farmers’ market? When I finally do catch movement — a car or truck, likely, traveling along a slim thread of lonely road — it reinforces that initial wonder.

I’m not what you would call well-traveled. I’ve been to Europe, Central America, a couple of places in the eastern provinces of Canada, several places up and down the East Coast, and — of course — the Pacific Northwest. It would seem that I’ve only ever picked away at the edges, never experienced the wide open spaces of our country’s interior. Part of it has to do with my supposed need to be within striking distance of an ocean. When you fly from the east coast to the west, it takes a while before the distances between urban areas grow so great that you sense a real shift, as if you should fully expect to have your passport handy were you to land somewhere below. As the plane passes over North Dakota, then Montana, it’s impossible to ignore the physical contrast between what is rolling out beneath you and the tightly arranged communities on either coast. I find it humbling. It’s also a reminder of the foreignness — to me — of so much of our country.

All of this current reflection would not have come to pass if not for a decision I made a couple weeks ago. I’m going to give Yellowstone another chance, I vowed. I watched Season 1 a year ago, and then promptly pitched the remote across the room and thought, what a horrible bunch of creatures. Even the ones who seem decent or innocent become poisoned by their association with the Duttons. There may be one exception — Walker, who, soon after being condemned to servitude at the Yellowstone, remarks about the aura of evil that pervades the ranch. (As I begin Season 2, I hold out the slimmest of hopes that he’s incorruptible.)

I plowed through Season 1 again, and felt that same urge to sling the remote across the room. I want to understand, however, why Yellowstone persists as one of TV’s most popular drama series. I’m filled with questions: Do viewers hang on the desperate hope that, sooner or later, these vile characters will reveal traces of humanity? Is it instead our need for validation that there are depraved people out there (maybe even entire communities), but we are not like that? Does it instead have something to do — at least marginally — with the derisive attitude that people in the heartland have toward the “coastal elites”? (The unfavorable portrayal of them is unmistakable.) Or is it the yearning to experience — even if indirectly — the majesty and breathtaking beauty of Big Sky country? Maybe it’s the wish to make sense of the cowboy lifestyle, unveil the mystique? (I do love the idea that the show employs authentic cowboy actors.)

Because I want to be proven wrong — I want Walker to resist the evil that he knows surrounds the ranch, and I want Jimmy not to be so needy (to the point that he loses all remaining vestiges of innocence) — I’m giving Yellowstone this second chance. . . even if it means subjecting myself to Beth Dutton, a specimen of pure evil if ever there was one.

Am I wrong?

Sources (for background on origin of “flyover country”, and Thomas McGuane):

One Less Bird Outside My Window

As a homeowner who maintains several bird feeders, I have to be okay with the divine concept that we call the circle of life. It doesn’t mean that I don’t ascribe my own pecking order based on my own preferences. Regardless of nature’s order of assignments on the food chain, if one animal depends for survival on another animal as food source, it doesn’t engender my sense of fondness for the predator. More than once on a walk around my neighborhood, I’ve spotted a Cooper’s hawk ambush one of the more popular feeding stations. I automatically “feel bad” for the small birds and deem the hawk a “bully”. I know it’s illogical, and frequent reminders to myself that it’s all the natural order of things makes no bit of difference.

All of the turbulence in my life these days seems to erupt when I step outside my front door. The other night, just as dusk was settling in, I opened my front door to take Mona and Bowie out for a potty break. I’m overly twitchy, I admit, since Mona’s escape earlier in the week. I had both on a taut leash and was looking down at them and the three stairs that we were to descend somehow as a body of one and in one fluid motion. It was in that paused interval that a little bird swooped around us and aimed for the barberry bush two feet away. Literally hot on its tail was a hawk. Before the small bird was able to reach safety deep in the barberry, the hawk plunged into the bush, and grabbed him with his lethal talons. Within the bush, a ferocious flapping of wings (both birds?) ensued for a brief five seconds or so, and the hawk flew off with his prize.

The disturbing melee rendered the three of us immobile as we tried to make sense of it. Mona and Bowie, of course, were then ready to explore the barberry bush. In fact, their curiosity was so great that I failed to redirect them for our particular visit outside. While I tugged on their leashes and issued pathetic verbal pleas, my own anguish only increased. I convinced myself that had I not stepped outside at the very moment the little bird was hoping to fly a direct path to the barberry, he would have managed to elude the hawk. In flight, generally speaking, the little bird has the advantage over the hawk, who cannot pivot mid-air quite as well. I had sent him into the direct flight path of the hawk. Such was my reasoning.

I cannot swear that the hawk was a Cooper’s hawk — perhaps it was a sharp-shinned hawk or a northern goshawk — but judging by his reckless diving into a barberry bush, it’s evident that it was some type of accipiter.* These are not the hawks that you see gliding in lazy circular trajectories high above. Instead, their stealth involves well-camouflaged perches and lightning quick ambush. In our case, the direction of flight for both prey and predator suggested that the small bird — likely a sparrow — was startled at our feeder station, and attempted to reach the safety of the spiny network of branches that the barberry provided.

I consider one final note of irony in this circle of life story. One day, just a couple months ago, I got out my pruners and determined to scale back the overgrown and unruly barberry. I can only describe my relationship with it as one of deep animosity. If you’ve ever gotten one of its barbs as a splinter, you’ll understand. As I raised my arms to part the branches and assess which ones should be culled, I surprised three or four birds who had been sitting quietly deep inside it. I instantly withdrew, but they flew off, anyway. From that time, I’ve found it impossible to clip any of those branches despite my displeasure over a landscape element that is too prickly for my liking. I’ve been much more conscious of its tenants these days; depending on the time of day, if you stand quietly and peer through it, you can see — and occasionally hear — the birds hopping around within. It’s a sight that makes me happy. At the same time, it does present me with a quandary, one that I’ll have to sort out, probably in a couple months.

You have 5 seconds to spot two little birds in the barberry bush.

It’s difficult to accept that hawks are not the villains in this story. I make the mistake, however, of equating it with something that resembles a David and Goliath clash, where the bigger adversary is naturally corrupt or bad, and the innate goodness of the small contestant evokes sympathy. We therefore pull for the lil’ guy. Whether my timing was simply unfortunate — one second earlier or later making all the difference — in the end, it’s all part of the natural order of that thing we call Life. I have no choice but to accept it.

*It was a remarkable spectacle. The (presumed) sparrow dove into the barberry with practiced skill — he, no doubt, had done that many times before. The hawk pitched into it with complete abandon. It occurred to me that a split-second calculation of risk had taken place. Later investigation online brought me to an oft-quoted 2002 study conducted by the Raptor Research Foundation: “Incidence of Naturally Healed Fractures in the Pectoral Bones of North American Accipiters“. A couple of interesting take-aways for me were that (1) woodland hawks — such as the Cooper’s Hawk, the Sharp-shinned Hawk, and the Northern Goshawk — are famously impervious to risk, and (2) just under 70% die not from natural causes, but from encounters with man-made objects. In that same 2002 study (cited also here), scientific examination of Cooper’s Hawk skeletons indicated that 23% of them had evidence of healed-over fractures of the pectoral bones. I’d say they’re some kind of crazy.

Sources:

https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Coopers_Hawk/overview

Click to access p00229-p00230.pdf