More Birds and Bears

Summer 2008

The sun is hotter now, so our doors are usually wide open (unless we get one of our sudden 50 mph gusts of wind).  We have had a number of bird visitors in the house.  The inevitable hummingbird came to feed on a piece of bright red cloth in the sun-room and needed persuading to leave.  A female Western Tanager with bright eye and neat olive coloring made a flying visit in one door and out the other.  Her mate, the male Tanager, is often around near the pond with his startlingly bright yellow body and rosy head.   

The Dusky Flycatcher came last and stayed longest.  It exhausted itself flying against the skylights until I caught it in a butterfly net.  Then it sat panting in Marisha’s hand as it recovered.  Eventually, it sat up and perched on her finger, gripping tight with its sharp claws - she made a face but held still.  We had time to examine the “whiskers” around it’s beak and admire the eye ring and pale breast before it flew off. 

Last weekend, I went to visit Violet who was hosting a Boulder Gardener’s meeting at her magnificent mountain garden in Cold Creek Canyon.  The air was thick with humming birds and Tree Swallows, swooping after insects and resting on the wires.  She has a number of nesting boxes so I could see little swallow heads peeking out as they sat on their eggs.  Also on the wires and flashing brilliant azure blue were a number of Mountain Bluebirds.  They are often hard to spot as their plumage looks drab gray but in the sun they sparkle.

Eating breakfast this morning in our “Secret Garden”, Orianne pointed out a young “cinnamon” bear ambling up the mountainside, probably one of the pair that raided our compost.  It looked rather thin and lonely to me, and I wondered what had happened to its sibling.  Probably, as the pickings get thinner during the summer, the bears have to make it on their own.  

Do bears experience adolescent trauma as they are wrenched from their family by the imperative to get food?  How do they find all those thousands of calories each day to feed that big body?  It cannot be an easy life, alone and often hungry, but at least they are free of our demanding human schedules.

Lucy and Marisha

Lucy continued to hang around and formed a strong bond with Marisha during 2008.  She would approach Marisha and wait patiently to be fed from her hand.  We loved to watch her do the egg trick - pick up a raw egg in her mouth and take it away to be eaten later.

Suddenly Lucy stopped coming round and we feared the worst.

Lucy the Fox

June 2008 - Lucy was hanging around as she got stronger.
This last winter was pretty harsh and cold.  There were many days when I preferred to stay inside rather than take the bucket of kitchen scraps down to the compost pile, so a few were left on the deck to freeze. Late in the winter, the kitchen scraps started to get strewn around.  Dainty footprints spotted the deck and we knew a fox was visiting and stealing our left-overs. 

It is not a good idea to feed most wild animals.  They get dependent on the handouts and seldom get the range of nutrients they can obtain from “live” food.  So we started to be a bit more careful about the compost buckets.

One evening, as we sat down for supper in still freezing April, the pointed and delicate face of a fox appeared at the sliding glass door.  She was skinny and ragged, half of her fur coat missing.  Her tail, rather than being a grand russet broom, looked wasted and gray.  Worst of all, she was limping badly on her left front leg; it had a swelling high on the thigh - probably broken or badly damaged.   There we were in the warmth, tucking into a feast.  There she was, a pane of glass away, slowly dying of cold and malnutrition. 

With a 12 year old, soft-hearted daughter and a wife who loves to take care of people, I had no chance of upholding the wisdom of letting her starve.  While not quite begging like a dog, her eyes and stance made it quite clear she was expecting some genuine response from us.  We fed her.

Now it is June and we have a pet fox.  Her name is Lucy Fox; she visits most evenings at around 6.00.  Her left leg is still swollen and obviously painful, worse some days than others.  She runs, or rather hobbles gracefully on three legs.

I am startled by her quiet presence, a few feet behind me as I walk up from the greenhouse with vegetable for supper.  She is there when we unload groceries from the car.   At dusk, she sits patiently, alert and focused, waiting for her daily dues.  If you have food and stay still, she will fearlessly come within a couple of feet.  She is the perfect pet - quiet, undemanding, beautiful and intelligent.