A Tale Of Bantams And Bobcats

The recent trapping of a bobcat in our neighborhood took me back to a childhood experience in Virginia. We lived on two acres in a part of Roanoke which had built up following World War II. There were still some wooded areas, a few old farmhouses, and some blocks built up more densely with small GI Bill houses, where people took care of their lawns and gardens.

About the age of ten, I decided to earn my Girl Scout poultry badge. My father built a sturdy chicken coop in the back yard, and I acquired a pair of bantams. They became pets, and were allowed to range around the yard. Soon we d

iscovered a nest fashioned from a straw bale in the garage, and in time Queenie hatched out a brood of eight adorable little chicks.

Queenie, Prince and their chicks (all named, of course) ranged further and further, but retired to the safety of the pen at night. My mother began to get a few calls… “Do you have chickens? There are chickens scratching up my flowers, eating the seeds I just planted in my garden!” She would go and shoo them back home.

One day, a chicken hawk swooped down and snatched “Astrid” from the front yard. My dad was angry—“We ought to shoot that old hawk.” (He’d raised bantams and homing pigeons as a kid.)

I was sad, but somehow, even at ten, I understood that the hawk was wild, that it flew over my neighbors’ yards as well, and that it was just doing what a hawk does. It kept down rodents and was part of the grand balance. Nobody had to tell me that, I just knew. And of course, dad didn’t shoot it.

Eventually, the chicks grew big enough to fly and they began roosting at night in the neighbor’s tall Doug firs. Of the seven chicks, five were roosters, so early every morning their crowing echoed for blocks.

Finally, my long-suffering mother had enough of the neighbors’ polite complaints, and she called the county agent, who knew of a 4H kid out in the country who needed a project. When I came home from school, the bantams were gone.

Fast-forward half a century to present-day Placitas.

When we moved here in 1975 we planted a native landscape intended to attract wild birds. A stray cat showed up, but the day I caught it with a quail chick in its mouth we let it indoors and adopted it. Pepper lived to be 21. We’ve had other cats too, but all indoor cats. You see, our garden benefits from the lizards and birds. A well-fed domestic cat kills those, but is usually indoors at night when mice and packrats are about. Our dogs have always been medium-sized, and fenced, so not much help with rabbits.

As the years passed, we had more of a problem with trespassing cats (cf. my bantams) and the nesting birds and lizards decreased while packrats, mice, and rabbits increased. Coyotes didn’t seem to keep them down, either. I pretty much gave up on a garden.

Then, about five years ago, things changed. Suddenly there were fewer rabbits, and we began seeing bobcats. One day I watched a mother with two kittens cavort in our side yard for nearly an hour. The next morning there was a freshly killed jackrabbit in the yard, which “mom” soon retrieved for the kittens’ breakfast. A few weeks later, we heard a great horned owl, and then found one of the kittens dead. It appeared to have the kind of damage an owl would cause, though the mother probably protected the mortally injured kitten from being eaten by the owl. Predator became prey, in this case.

In short, with the bobcats came a better balance between prey and predator. To those who see them as a threat to small pets left unattended outdoors, I would suggest:

1) keep small pets indoors unless you can be outside with them

2) if they must stay outdoors while you are away, then build them a safe pen or run with top and sides (as we did with our poultry here in Placitas)

3) please keep them on your property, lest neighbors consider them pests (like my bantams became)

4) should they become victims of natural predators, like my little bantam chick, don’t blame them for acting out their part in the ecosystem.

We all need to consider the consequences of our actions. If I leave poison outside to “get rid of” rodents, I then poison their predators. If I kill every snake out of fear, I can expect more rodents. If I trap coyotes and bobcats, I remove predators from the system and have to deal with too many rabbits and rodents.
And so do my neighbors.

For those who wish to live in a very controlled, sterile neighborhood, there are plenty of urban areas nearby. But since we choose to live in an area with hawks, owls, rabbits, lizards, snakes, bobcats, coyotes, vinegaroons, and yes, tarantulas, please let’s work together to live in harmony and balance as part of the natural environment of this beautiful community.

Let’s learn about the native plants and animals and the web of creation. We are all part of it.
Reprinted with permission from the Sandoval Signpost.

Epiphany 2012

Today is the 100th birthday of New Mexico statehood; I arrived just after their fiftieth. About 1982 I met a woman who traveled east from the Territory of New Mexico in September 1911 to enroll at my alma mater in Virginia. She said it took five days by train.

This afternoon, we chipped much of the only native piñon that had grown on our property. It probably was well over sixty years old when it died in the drought of 2005. Having weathered for the past six years, it offered little resistance to the blades.

Now it will mulch those plants still surviving the continuing drought.

New Mexico is a tough place for trees. We lost much of the ponderosa forest to epic wildfires in the Jemez last summer. Before that, it was the piñon—ironically, our state tree.

So we celebrate our statehood centennial in exceptional drought, having lost most of our piñon forest. Our state flower, the yucca, didn't even bloom last summer.

We do have a state fossil: the coelophysis. It is doing well, as extinct animals require no water.

NOAA warns that La Niña will set us up for a dry spring. At this moment, at least, the snow pack is good, so perhaps April will bring some wildflower blooms.

O, fair New Mexico, we love, we love you so...

But it is heartbreaking to see these changes.

Winter Solstice 2011

Tomorrow is the Winter Solstice, 2011. It is time to look back on a year which, for us and our family, at least, has been good. We’ve stayed healthy, been blessed with more than enough, and have been able to spend time with many beloved friends and with our family.

In March, we took our grandsons to visit Bandelier National Monument in the nearby Jemez Mountains. We hiked through magnificent ponderosas, cottonwoods, and elders along tiny Rito de los Frijoles. They climbed wooden ladders to explore caves carved from the volcanic tufa, ceilings blackened by ancient hearth fires and walls populated by petroglyphs and pictographs. The boys took careful notes, and we watched as they proudly received their Junior Ranger badges in the newly refurbished visitor center.

By May there had been no rain since December. The dusty brown spring produced almost no wildflowers, but plenty of strong wind, and our skies were filled with acrid smoke from the burning forests in southern Arizona, over 250 miles away.

In early June we escaped the smoke to the Colorado high country, where ample snowpack had resulted in heavy runoff. The drift next to the cabin provided us with ice for the cooler, and we were glad for the crackling aspen fire in the old blue woodstove. This time, fire was good, under control.

But two days after we returned home, a giant plume of smoke suddenly blew up over the Jemez: thus began the worst forest fire in recorded New Mexico history. In the first 24 hours 44,000 acres were torched, and we watched in horror from our house in Placitas as flames blazed along Cochiti Mesa and up the canyons into the ponderosa forest. At night we watched as the fire crowned across the ridges; during day we wiped a heavy layer of ash from the outdoor studio tables.

The Las Conchas fire burned for over a month, eventually incinerating over 156,000 acres. Then, when the August monsoons came, floods scoured the denuded canyons and the Rio Grande ran black with ash.

Now, in December, we are blessed with moisture in a more gentle form… “snow on snow on snow.” This mid-winter may seem bleak as memories of the wildfires cast a pall, but the snows promise some sort of recovery for the burned mountains.

Looking over to the Jemez today, I see that their snow patterns have changed. They will never look the same during my lifetime, probably never ever.

Tonight we celebrate the longest night of the year by listening as poets read by the light of a single candle. Their theme: Fire, Ashes, Snow.

Fire can be destructive, cleansing, warming, nourishing, and/or illuminating.

Friday, the daylight will be imperceptibly longer, and Saturday evening, Christmas Eve luminarias will mark the birth of Jesus, God’s Light for us.

May our holidays be warmed by the joy of sharing with family, friends, and especially with some we may not know. And may the next year bring promise and light to each of us and to all of creation.

Faith

Yesterday I spent an hour or so creating a spiral meditation path on a vacant lot across the road. Though it is late spring, there are no wildflowers or native grasses. The native junipers have been trimmed up so that they can no longer shelter their roots from the sun and wind, and the rocky ground is dusty after months without rain.

From a high point I look across the Rio Grande Valley, sixty miles west to Mount Taylor and back five miles east to the Sandias, thinking that surely there is no place around here where someone has not walked, hunted, cut firewood, or grazed sheep… all impacting the land over the past ten thousand years. But right here, for the past three decades, this spot has endured its most intense human occupation.

Our neighbors spent thirty-seven years in this place. With their own hands they built a house, kennels, and several out-buildings, poured a foundation for an unfinished addition, buried half-burned trash, old car parts, broken sports equipment, beloved pets, and other stuff as yet undiscovered. When it was time for them to move on, we bought their land.

Since the house was unlivable, we began the cleanup by stripping the wiring and recycling or giving away anything usable before demolition. Parts of the kennel went to a local animal shelter, a shed to a neighbor, metal roofing to a Pueblo farm family. Weathered wood board and batten went to a local builder to become a ceiling in a new adobe home.

The entire two acres was littered with nails, barbed wire, shards of glass, broken toys, and the miscellany of modern life. We did a lot of digging, filled a dumpster, and hauled home anything we thought might be of some value to us.

Now, three years later, it is time to acknowledge the past and look toward the future.

Starting at the center I rake a widdershin path out in a dynamic spiral, gathering bits of wire, screws, glass, plastic, and native rocks. An intact concrete patio block emerges to become the center post. Every piece of trash caught by the tines of the rake is tossed to the center, testament to the way in which our transitory existence can have lasting impact on this earth.

Finally the spiral has grown to fill its space, so that now, entering from the left, one may proceed clockwise to the center.

As I head back home, I spot some pale purple and gold iris blooming in an old flower bed. Not being desert natives, they won’t long survive unless someone waters them. But for this moment they are beautiful. And now I know that something wonderful can exist here again.

Crooked fish and Straight Thinking

“I have some guppies that have deformed spines… why don’t you try to figure out if that could be hereditary? I’ll give them to you if you want.”

Soon I was sharing my bedroom with a dozen or so one-gallon pickle jars full of generations of guppies, keeping meticulous records of their procreation and health. (I still have nightmares about scrubbing algae from the jars and counting tiny fish.)

Taking my friend’s suggestion turned out to be a defining moment in my life. Two years later I was walking up to the podium at the Western Virginia Regional Science Fair. Turned out the first place award in biology came with an all-expense-paid trip to the International Science Fair in Albuquerque NM. (I thought, “Where?”)

That was in May 1963. I fell in love with New Mexico—from the new Western Skies motel on east Central one could look up to the east mesa at sunset, where tall grass reflected the golden skies to the west. We rented horses and rode down the arroyo below Four Hills. We toured Old Town, and munched sopaipillas dripping with honey. There was a tour to Los Alamos, where we lunched at Philomena’s (the old guard station), and a day trip to Acoma Pueblo, the Sky City.

But mostly it was the light, the ultramarine fading to azure green at twilight peppered with stars, that caused me to affirm to my teacher, “I’m coming back here to live.” “Yes dear,” she humored me.

That was nearly fifty years ago. What if I hadn’t taken my friend up on his offer? For sure, I wouldn’t be sitting out here in the desert, listening to coyotes celebrate as the full moon rises over the Sandias.

Bondo: A Good Old Dog

This epitaph is meticulously chiseled in blackened letters into a gray granite headstone within an old picket fence, leaning askew with peeling white paint. The grave is covered with an old blanket, disintegrating now. It is capped with carefully chosen black lava rock from the banks of lower Dorsey Creek in Poncha Pass.

Bondo was probably a good-sized dog from the size of the grave, and he was obviously worth the effort put into this interment. Maybe he ran these sagebrush hills through aspen and fir, following cattle with his owner.

I'd like to know more about him.

Wild and isolated Poncha Pass overlooks the expansive San Luis Valley to the south and is traversed today by US 285. Dorsey Creek is a Forest Service access road just south of the pass.

Epiphany invited

This twelfth day of Christmas, Kings Day, Epiphany is bright and clear in the high desert. Although snow still lingers on the shaded ground, the greenhouse is eighty degrees, with Christmas cactus in full bloom and Meyer lemons ripe for harvest.

This morning a flock of mountain bluebirds feasted on juniper berries on nearby Forest Service land. How apt the phrase, "bluebird of happiness"... what possible survival benefit could such magnificent azure afford? More senseless beauty.

Now a white winged dove peers down at me from a locust, still fluffed against the cold. Our feeder has hosted the winter regulars: juncos, towhees, one lovely brown thrasher, and many others. A quick check in the summerhouse fails to provide a sighting of the Western screech owl who has been in residence since August. He was here at least until mid December... perhaps he has scored a warmer roost these days.

So I poke around, searching for some insight, some spark, some enlightenment. Bring it on — I'm ready!