Category: Wild Kingdom

Bear sign

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 20 Comments
A witty response to an unnecessary shooting.

Here on this mountain top, oh-oh-oh
I got some wild, wild life — “Wild Wild Life,” Talking Heads

“Wild wild life.” You ain’t alone, David old scout.

Herself recently took off for a few days of thrifting with a gal pal, leaving me and Miss Mia Sopaipilla to hold down the fort.

She didn’t get back in time to see the bear in our back yard.

Miss Mia and I were sound asleep when the bear dropped by to see if we had anything to eat. Which, of course, we did — two bird feeders and three hummingbird feeders.

The racket at the buffet woke me — but not Miss Mia, who’s as deaf as a stump — and as I tumbled out of bed I figured we were dealing with a raccoon, maybe a skunk.

Nope. Bear. Small to medium, and in the early stages of deciding that getting any breakfast out of those polycarbonate tubes would burn more calories than s/he could hope to consume.

“Did you get any pictures?” Herself asked when I texted her the news. Yeah, right, I’m stumbling outside at oh-dark-thirty to snap a selfie with a famished bear. I’ve seen how fast they can run, and how fast I can run. No, thank you, please.

Anyway, social media is full of snaps of hungry, thirsty bears staggering down from the Sandias to plop into water features, snack on unsecured garbage, and in at least one incident, get shot by a knucklehead. The bear survived, though one of her two cubs did not, and the shootist seems short of friends (see a neighbor’s protest sign up top).

Our little bear problem was on me. I’d seen bear scat on a section of trail we run once or twice a week, and we’ve been avoiding that stretch because, hey, that scat doesn’t get there without the bear, amirite?

But I didn’t think to start bringing the feeders in at night. Now I am.

Didn’t keep the skunk out, though.

I heard something cough at stupid-thirty yesterday morning. Wasn’t me. Wasn’t Herself. Miss Mia was sacked out in the half-bath sink on the other side of the house, and she wouldn’t have heard a cough if it was her doing the coughing.

So up I get, grab a light, and crack the vertical blinds. Holy hell. Big ol’ skunk, butt aimed at our bedroom window.

Nope, sorry, not going out for a pic of that, either.

“Bear? Where?” asks our furry little pig in a blanket.

Snakes abound. Definitely a snake year. A dog walker recently told us she’d seen three buzzworms just that morning. One of them was in her yard.

The deer are back too, rolling up and down the arroyos like streetcars working the hills in San Francisco. Bucks with harems, does with speckled fawns.

Quail. Herself and I quit counting after seeing 50 on one recent ride.

And the hummingbirds? Off the charts. It looks like the Battle of Britain out there. We’re burning through sugar faster than three kindergartens and a Dunkin’ next to a cop shop.

Hey … it just occurred to me. Do you think they’re visiting us the way we visit zoos?

“Just look at the poor hairless apes, kids. Nearly extinct. I’d like to say we’ll miss them when they’re gone, but I’d be lying. They’ve certainly had a wild, wild life.”

‘You went to bed with a functioning vehicle. …’

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments

Base camp at the overflow area in McDowell Mountain Regional Park, circa 2004.

Ken Layne kicks off this week’s installment of Desert Oracle Radio with a nod to a critter I know all too well — the “truck roach,” a.k.a. the wood rat.

Back when we were camped on that windscoured rockpile near Weirdcliffe in Crusty County, Colo., the deer, bears, ring-tailed cats, buzzworms, mountain lions, coyotes, and wood rats paid us regular visits. Once or twice the rats found their way into our laundry closet via the exhaust ductwork from the washer-dryer combo, which I then would have to disconnect and drag onto the deck so the furry little burglar could make his getaway.

On one memorable occasion, after we had relocated to Bibleburg, we drove back up to the Weirdcliffe place for a relaxing weekend in the boondocks. Herself dashed inside for a wee, and in short order I heard a screech worthy of a slasher film. An invading wood rat had managed to escape the laundry closet only to drown in the downstairs toilet.

But the pièce de résistance of our rodent experience centered on our 1998 Toyota Tacoma pickup, pictured above.

This outrageously expensive machine was practically brand new when one day it developed a hitch in its gitalong, an inexplicable stutter in its step. “This won’t do, not at all,” I thought, and lurched down Hardscrabble Canyon and over to the Toyota dealer in Pueblo that had sold me the thing.

The shop dudes said they’d have a quick look-see and suggested I go grab a bite of lunch. When I returned they were having themselves a huge hee, along with a haw or two or three.

Seems that when the young wrench assigned to my problem popped the hood, a giant wood rat leapt out of the engine compartment, then took a high-speed lap or two around the service bay before rocketing back into the truck somewhere.

The sonofabitch had been gnawing on the wiring harness, which explained the spastic nature of the vehicle’s operation. I got a new one of those along with some advice about various potions for discouraging peckish ratoncitos.

We never did figure out what happened to that particular wood rat, who must have been the most widely traveled member of his clan. I often thought of him holding forth to his grandchildren about the time he surfed a Toyota all the way to Pueblo and back.

Bird feeders

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments

The food chain in operation.

It seems our bird feeders are doing double duty. Not only do they feed seed to birds, they feed birds to birds.

This may be a peregrine falcon* camped out in a backyard pine, stripping the feathers and flesh from an unfortunate dove, no doubt a visitor to the feeders hanging from a maple tree by the picture window. Hal thinks so, anyway, and he’s more knowledgeable about these matters than I am.

“Whaddaya taking pictures for? You with the police?”

We’ve seen a Cooper’s hawk working the neighborhood, but this is our first glimpse of a peregrine on the job. I wanted to get closer for a better shot with the Sony RX100 III, but I didn’t want to interrupt his/her dinner. Maybe it’s time to get another DSLR, start putting this wobbly economy back on its uncertain feet.

Funny thing is, the neighbor kids had just been visiting (at a safe and sane socialist distance) and we were talking about the wildlife we’d seen recently, from bugs to bobcats to bullsnakes. We didn’t notice the feathers falling from the pine until mom had come to collect them for their own dinner.

* Or a sharp-shinned hawk. Or a Cooper’s hawk. Or a very small Hawkman looking for his own DC movie, which would puzzle me mightily, because DC movies mostly suck with malice aforethought, even more so than Marvel movies, which is a very high bar indeed where suckitude is concerned, and no self-respecting raptor would have anything to do with either of them.

Morning report

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments

We won’t need any sunscreen today.

No, you haven’t stroked out. All is well. What you’re seeing is the wind-driven rain smearing Miss Mia Sopaipilla’s upper-deck observation window.

Frankly, she finds this irksome. The Enemy is everywhere, and eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, as we discovered last night when a stray cat materialized outside the Southwestern Sally Port.

I was loading the dishwasher when a horrific yowling and clatter nearly gave me a stroke. I thought maybe the Dead had breached the Wall, but nope. It was Mia, scattering the vertical blinds as she marched to and fro alongside the sliding glass doors, challenging a feline interloper to personal combat, while Field Marshal Turkish von Turkenstein (commander, 1st Feline Home Defense Regiment) formulated strategy and tactics from his command post in the rear.

This morning I awakened to find that the commander and his staff duty officer had deployed various biological countermeasures overnight (the Geneva Convention notwithstanding), and terrorists had disabled the coffee grinder. But I was able to bring the base back to full readiness with various cleaning products, some elbow grease and much bad language.

Opening a few windows helped, too, until the rain started coming in sideways.

That is all.

Oh, deer

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments

Miss Mia Sopaipilla thinks a little fresh venison would enhance the daily bowl of dry cat food. | Photo: Herself

Eight o’clock, 70 degrees. Summer may not officially start until June 21, but it feels pretty damn’ summery right now.

The drought is driving famished mule deer down from the foothills and into people’s yards, including ours. The rose bushes provide tasty morsels, as do the lilacs. Looks like they’ve been after the pears as well. And the cinderblock wall is taking something of a beating from the JV hurdlers.

This one was scrawny but a good leaper. Cleared the wall in a single bound.