Elegy for a Bird Feeder

 The finches (purple, house, and gold), along with their dun-colored wives and children, are gone. So are the titmice, nuthatches, chickadees, mourning doves, and woodpeckers (downy, hairy, and red-bellied). Also the rose-breasted grosbeak couple, the cardinal family, several tribes of unidentifiable (by me) sparrows, and all the chipmunks. Even the squirrels have fled. 

A bear was seen recently in our retirement community, and I had to take down the sunflower seed feeder, the suet cage (which needed to be refilled every day), and the squirrel baffle. If I had been living on my own, I would have taken my chances with the bear, but living where we do, I felt that I needed to be prudent. 

Taking down the feeders was one of the low points in a not-so-easy summer. The bear’s appearance coincided with the fledging of dozens of finches in the trees nearby. Four or five baby birds at a time would perch on the feeder, scrambling and fluttering on top of each other for their beleaguered parent to stuff seeds down their gullets. For hours after I took down the feeders the birds kept coming, and I could hear the insistent zik-zik of the young begging for food. I spent the afternoon in the bedroom, to get away from the sight and sound of so much disappointment. 

Then, suddenly, they gave up. Our yard is now bird-, squirrel-, and chipmunk-free. The cat Telemann, who used to spend his days leaping from windowsill to windowsill, lashing his tail and flinging himself at the glass in the eternal hope of catching one of the critters, now sleeps his life away. Sometimes—not often--a bird comes to the birdbath, drinks for a couple of seconds, and takes off. 

And sometimes a bee from the hives across the street perches on the rim and sips a drop or two. This is cause for much excitement—look, a bee!—kind of how you would feel if a unicorn emerged from the woods and approached your house. I had never thought or cared about the drinking habits of bees, but I do now. 

Still, talk about downsizing! After I gave up my goats and chickens, I assuaged my urge to nurture by feeding birds and squirrels. Now I’m reduced to offering water to bees. But bees, I remind myself, are better than nothing. 

The universe is doing its best to teach me lessons in non-attachment, but I am not a good student. I can’t wait for the first frost, when the trees turn colors and the bear goes to sleep in his cave, and I can put out the feeders again.

Notes From Yellowstone, Part The Second

June 12, 2012

In the park before seven, we saw a long line of cars stopped by the road, and people peering through spotting scopes and speaking in whispers, as if they were in church.

The Mollie Pack—named after Mollie Beattie, the director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service who was instrumental in bringing wolves back to Yellowstone—had killed a bison cow during the night. There were two meadows bisected by the Lamar River between us and the wolves, so we had to use optical aids to see them well.

I counted eight to ten wolves around the carcass. Three of them were flung flat on the ground, looking exactly like Wolfie when he comes back exhausted (in a good way) from his stay at the B&B. But these wolves were not tired. They were full of bison, dozing off like fat uncles after a Thanksgiving meal. The others were ripping out huge slabs of meat, carrying them off, and returning for seconds. (Fact: a wolf feeding on a carcass consumes over two pounds of meat a minute.)

It takes a lot of energy to eat a bison. The wolves would dive into its entrails, and every once in a while you could see the great head lift off the ground or a hind leg jerk towards the sky as the pack struggled to tear off the meat.

Most of the wolves were “black,” which is actually a dark reddish brown, a relatively rare color except in Yellowstone wolves. The other Mollies had the typical German Shepherd black/gray/white coat pattern. The German Shepherd illusion was completed by the tracking collars that all the wolves wore around their necks. Their muzzles and ruffs and forelegs were covered in blood.

We stood watching for almost three hours. The meadow was like a stage, and the frieze of wolves around the carcass like a troupe of actors improvising on a familiar plot. A troupe of ravens waited in the wings for their turn at the dead cow.

There was a herd of bison nearby—there is always a herd of bison nearby in the park—grazing and apparently unconcerned about the Mollies. But gradually three bulls made their way towards the carcass, and  we watched in disbelief as the biggest one put his muzzle into the remains of his dead relative. For a while, it looked as if he were eating right alongside the wolves. Then he stood over the carcass, and the wolves had to dart under his belly and between his legs to get at the meat.

The first bison moved off and the other two took their turns, sniffing and pawing the carcass and trying to lift parts of it with their heads. Then the biggest bison returned to the kill and, goat-like, butted the wolves away. This was the ravens' cue, and quickly the carcass disappeared under their oscillating black forms.

The bison eventually moved off; the wolves returned; the ravens fled. We stood transfixed. What had we just seen? Bison grief?

Wary of anthropomorphizing, the next day we casually mentioned the scene to a park ranger. “That was a bison funeral,” he told us. “They do it whenever one of the herd is killed.”

Wolves do not often kill bison: bulls weigh 2,000 pounds and wolves a maximum of 140. It takes wolves a while to learn to kill bison, and for some reason the Mollie Pack has become especially adept at it. The ranger said that the adult Mollies are all females, accompanied by a few juvenile males. They need an alpha male, he said. But from what we saw, the Mollies are doing o.k.

I won't list all the other animals we saw during the rest of our stay. But I must mention the trio of black bears we ran into disporting themselves in somebody's backyard near our lodge. The mother must have had a recessive gene for coat color, because in the setting sun she was a luminous gold all over. Her infants were black, big-headed and clumsy, toddling around and trying to climb the guy wire of the utility pole.

There's only so long you can stand and watch these scenes. Then you either have to go eat breakfast, or you have to walk back to the lodge because it's getting dark. Or you can fly back to Vermont and sell all you have and move to Yellowstone and spend the rest of your life following the Mollies and the bison around the Lamar Valley until your time comes and you become another carcass on the meadow.

(Note:  for some reason, Blogger is letting me post, but not respond to comments.  Don't feel I'm ignoring you!)

Wild Encounters

Heard some blood-curdling screams the other night.  I am often awakened by bizarre noises in the woods nearby, and in my semi-conscious state I promise myself that I will remember exactly what they  sound like, so I can reproduce them for knowledgeable locals who can identify their source.  I never do remember the noises precisely, and so am left to imagine that we live in the vicinity of ghouls and catamounts.

I ran into the neighbor whose house is at the bottom of our field a couple of days after I heard the screams, and he said that he had heard them too.  We both agreed that they didn't sound like coyote communications.  Then he told me that a brown bear had climbed onto his porch recently and upset his can of birdseed.  And that a moose had wandered past his window.

I have been alternately cursing myself for missing these critters, and congratulating myself for living in a place where bears, moose, and the anonymous night shrieker--not to mention porcupines--amble so casually.  I've become blase about the does and fawns grazing on the lawn, or the turkey hens leading tiny poults single file down the driveway.  But a bear's presence still thrills me.  I've only seen one once, about four years ago, dismantling our bird feeder about four feet from the house. 

As for moose, I've never seen one in the wild, much less on our land.  But I'll never forget the one in the opening credits of Northern Exposure.  That show, to which I was addicted in the 1990s, made me dream of living in a small village in the frozen north, where people know each other by name and moose wander the streets.

And now I do.

Zucchini Vs. Bear

Last summer I wrote about some defensive uses of zucchini here.

Now I hear that zucchini is not only useful against dragons, but against bears as well.  A couple of nights ago a woman in Montana let her dogs out into the backyard and a black bear came barreling down the hill and attacked one of them.  She yelled and waved her arms and finally kicked the bear in the neck.  The bear then went after her, and after clawing her thigh tried to push its way into the house.  The woman grabbed a 14" zucchini that was providentially within reach on the kitchen counter and threw it at the bear.  The bear ran away.

 Which proves that everybody runs away from zucchini at this time of year.

Our Bear

Soon it will be the time of year when the State of Vermont admonishes its residents to put away their bird feeders. Yes, just at the moment when wild foods are at their ebb, just as the chickadees begin to sing their mating songs, just as the first migratory birds are starting to arrive, cold and hungry and tired, they want us to put away our feeders. Why? Because of the bears.

When bears wake up from hibernation, they are hungry, as you would be if your last meal had been at Thanksgiving. They are in a bad mood—something to do with low blood sugar, I bet. And they are hunting desperately for the last dried up berries dangling on the end of long-dead branches. If there is a full bird feeder nearby, they naturally go for it.

Our bird feeder sits in our backyard, close to the house. About fifteen yards back from the feeder, the woods begin and go on for quite a while. The first couple of years we were in Vermont I disregarded the State's warnings because I couldn't believe that a real bear would ever come to our backyard. We should be so lucky! A bear, after all, is a totally wild animal. You won't find a bear in a New Jersey parking lot, the way you will find deer and other suburban species there. Bears are magical, or there wouldn't be two of them in the sky on clear nights. Anyway, a Vermont bear would never visit a couple of newly-arrived flatlanders.

One early spring morning two years ago we woke up and saw that the bird feeder—one of those metal boxes with a counterweight designed to foil squirrels (they work)--had been knocked off its pole and dragged halfway across the yard. It would have taken a raccoon the size of a short man to accomplish this feat, or a vegetarian coyote with remarkably nimble front paws. And who or what could have dragged that heavy box so far, and bent the metal perch? Perhaps that short man, if he was very strong. Maybe a night-prowling Vermont lumberjack?

We tried every reductionist hypothesis we could dredge up, and finally had to conclude, much to our delight, that only a bear could have done the deed. We made a mental note to e-mail our friends and relatives with the news.

That night we were watching for the fourth time an episode of “As Time Goes By” when our Wolfie, then only seven months old, alerted. I turned my head and looked out the window. And there, at arm's length, was our bear. The night was dark, and he was dark, but I could see him plainly—not a very big bear, probably an adolescent emerging from his first winter's sleep.

By then the dogs were going crazy. He plainly heard them, but continued to snuffle around. Then, figuring it wasn't worth the commotion, he shuffled back into the woods.

That summer, driving on the road just below our hill, we saw him again. I'm sure it was our bear—not too big, black as the night, shuffling into the trees at the sound of the car. In the fall, at the village game supper, we heard that a bear had been shot near that same road.

I hope it wasn't our bear. I want him back, if only a glimpse of him—to be truthful, a glimpse is all I really want. But I want to know that he's out there, lurking in our woods, providing that whiff of danger and mystery that makes the fire in the stove feel doubly warm and protective on cold spring nights.

The birds needn't worry. There will be plenty of seeds in our feeder this spring.