The Nature of the Beast (according to Susan McCarthy)

Where do codfish get their food? Where does the town of Nahant get its revenue?

When I was a child in Massachusetts, my mother and her best friend used to visit the tidepools at Nahant. They kept salt-water aquariums at a time when no one did that, and they peopled these artificial tidepools with native creatures they collected. Usually they took their children with them, which included me and my best friend Molly.

When those days vanished in puffs of smoke – divorces, remarriages, moves across country – the visits to the tidepools ended for Molly. Three thousand miles away, my mother started over with Pacific tidepools. The only relationship that endured was the friendship between Molly and me.

Recently I visited Molly in Massachusetts. Her mother died some years ago, and when I persuaded Molly that we should revisit the tidepools, no one could tell us exactly where on Nahant we had gone. On the only available day, we went to the Nahant peninsula at low tide.

We drove around looking for rocky shores with tidepools. We asked a jogger if she knew where there were tidepools, or where we could park so we could look. She said “Nahant's a great town, but it's not very friendly to people who want to park.” She didn't know what to suggest.

When we came to East Point, I was pretty sure we had found the place. The minute you see East Point, you know it has great tidepools among its tumbles of big rocks festooned with seaweed. But those tidepools are next to Northeastern University's Marine Science Center (which didn't exist when I was a kid). You can drive out there, but they won't let you park. It's miles out, at the end of the peninsula, surrounded by lovely seascapes and No Parking signs, another of the scenes of my childhood that's off limits.

We parked anyway.

A field trip of high school kids was there. Most were only interested in jumping from rock to rock and climbing the cliffs. We met one intelligent boy who had figured out the best ways to locate crabs and was happy to pass along his discoveries. When angry teachers made the class leave because a few kids misbehaved, Molly and I had it to ourselves.

Molly examined a pool with a deep, irregular crevice on one side. “There's something in here,” she said. We could just see two suspicious eyes peering back at us. A crab? A shrimp? Neither of us felt like sticking our fingers in to be pinched. On dry land we might have put a small stick in the crevice to see if the creature would grab it and be pulled out. “The thing about tidepools is there are no sticks lying around,” Molly noted.

Cracks in the rocks were filled with clusters of small gold snails. There were little dark green crabs. There were mussels and barnacles and limpets. There were small sea urchins, banded with white and tan and pale green. There were pink five-rayed starfish. One silver dollar-sized starfish had four long rays and one extremely short one that was regenerating after some unfortunate incident. There were pink algae like the algae in California, both the kind that makes a flat crust on rocks or shells and the foliose kind like pink parsley. They seemed like they might be a slightly different pink than the California kind, a bit more of a salmon color, but I couldn't be sure.

We had to hurry away, but I found great things under the last few rocks. Under one were two little crabs feasting on a pulled-off claw from a big crab. Under another were two eel-shaped fish like California blennies, with elegant narrow vertical stripes on the dorsal fin. Under a third was something I had never seen in the Pacific: a baby lobster, three or four inches long, holding up its claws in case it needed to pinch me. It was a handsome, subtly-colored creature, and the minute I saw its suspicious eyes I knew that the creature Molly had found peering from the crevice had also been a baby lobster.

From talking to my mother and looking at Molly's mother's notebook, it seems that they never found lobsters at Nahant back in the day. On the web I found some recent research saying you can find baby lobsters in the intertidal zone (research about how to do a lobster census). I also read that the main predators of baby lobsters are codfish. I knew that overfishing had drastically reduced the number of cod in the last few decades. I also knew that the lobster fishery was in great shape, catching lots of lobsters. So I suspect that the reason our families hadn't found baby lobsters at Nahant years ago was that the cod had been getting them. The fact that Molly and I found lobsters may be a sign of codfish in trouble.

In the short time we had been out on the rocks we had gotten a parking ticket.

Yea, though I scamper through the playroom of death, I shall fear no elkhound

Even if they have never seen a cat and their parents have never seen a cat, the smell of cat hair fills a young rat with horror. You can easily measure aspects of this. For example, if they smell a cat in the “play chamber,” normally exuberant young lab rats won't play as much, an effect that lasts for five days. (It's just so creepy there.)

Much rat play consists of roughhousing and squeaking. A slightly fearful rat tends to freeze. A more fearful rat tends to run like mad.

Researcher Jaak Panksepp, a student of rat playtime and author of the interesting text “Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions,” suggests that some laboratory research may have been confused by the fact the researchers didn't control their experiments for the possibility that some rats were exposed to the dreadful smell of cats, either experimental subjects or pets. (“How did you do on the maze?” “Not so good. I was freaked out by that horrible smell. You?” “Same. The feeling of impending doom messes with my concentration.”)

Rats are also innately alarmed by the smell of ferrets, and Panksepp worried that he might be confounding his own research by carrying the scent of his dog Ginny. He tested this hypothesis by covering the floor of the play chamber with Ginny's fur. Since she was a Norwegian elkhound, he had plenty of fur to work with. Happily for Panksepp, it seems that elkhound fur doesn't scare rats. They frolicked at undiminished levels of activity. I imagine rats rolling over and over while clouds of fur rise around them, like puffs of dust in cartoons. This “suggests that the ancestors of such domestic dogs did not normally prey on rats in the wild,” Panksepp writes.


Dmitry Guskov

“Elkhound” is the English version of “elghund,” which of course means “moose dog.” Since the job of the elkhound is to find a moose and bark at it incessantly until the hunter can lumber up and kill it, you wouldn't want the dog to be distracted by rats when it should be yammering at moose. Perhaps its wild ancestors were similarly fixated on big game and hence there was no survival value for rats in viewing them with horror.

But what is the view of a naïve young moose? (“That play chamber is much too small!”)




[Leroy Anderson for U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service]

A secret ingredient in a Brunswick stew

Modoc County Road 1 runs through the long, narrow Surprise Valley in high desert of northeastern California. It's in a narrow band between mountains and alkaline lakebeds in the valley bottom. In this narrow band irrigation allows agriculture. Sagebrush has been replaced by grain crops.

Ground squirrels feel the need to dash across this road constantly. Agriculture has let their numbers boom. In spring these exuberant rodents (Spermophilus beldingi) are bulbous with health. When I visited in April, the huge ground squirrels looked to me like young marmots. To hawks and eagles they look delicious and convenient.

Since there aren't many trees in Surprise Valley, the abundant raptors don't have many places to perch. Power poles by the road are decked with birds of prey, including bald eagles.

To ranchers the ground squirrels look neither amusing nor tasty. They look destructive. Squirrels churn and pile the soil, making harvest harder. They eat crops. They excavate holes perfect for snapping the legs of livestock. They puncture drainage ditches with their burrows. They clear large areas around their burrows, endeavoring to turn alfalfa fields into Spermophilus subdivisions.

Ranchers used to poison them with sodium fluoroacetate, also called Compound 1080, until that was banned. They turned to guns. In March the Surprise Valley Chamber of Commerce holds a Squirrel Roundup. This doesn't involve actual rounding up but simply shooting as many as possible. Out-of-towners pay to participate. It's possible to shoot 300-400 in a day.  Hawks and eagles enthusiastically scavenge carcasses. “The fields... were...  swarmed by bald eagles, falcons and hawks... enjoying an evening meal,” wrote Jean Bilodeaux for the Klamath Falls Herald and News.

Judging by the number of squirrels frisking about in April, there are many ground squirrels left unscathed and unhumbled. I called the Chamber of Commerce to ask what kind of ammunition is used in the Squirrel Roundup, hoping to be told that lead is forbidden. They did not return my call.

Another source told me that squirrel hunters use lead. That narrow band of the Surprise Valley must be intensely pocked with the stuff. It probably doesn't hurt squirrels that aren't actually shot.

But birds of prey are gobblers of gravel. Lacking teeth, they grind food in their gizzards, which they stock with little pebbles. They swallow chips of bone, glass, or metal, anything hard that seems to them like it would make cool false teeth. When a hawk finds shot in a carcass, it's like getting take-out Chinese food with free chopsticks. Lead can also flake, tainting a carcass.

Lead poisoning kills an unknown number of raptors every year. Most deaths occur in the wild and aren't reported. But some birds end up in wildlife rescue centers, where the problem is diagnosed. Sometimes it can be successfully treated, sometimes not. (Other birds can get lead poisoning too. Birds of prey simply encounter more due to their gourmet interest in dead bodies.)

Lead poisoning is such a serious problem for California condors that self-supporting birds living wild lives must regularly be captured so blood lead levels can be tested and they can undergo chelation therapy if necessary. Biologists climb up or rappel down to nests to cleanse them of unsalubrious items chicks will swallow. The use of lead shot is banned in an exclusion zone covering about 20% of the state to lessen the amount of lead in condor habitat. The Surprise Valley is not in that zone.

Reader, if this report has inspired you to sign up for next year's Squirrel Roundup, please don't use lead ammunition. Use steel, copper, tungsten, unicorn horn. Lead is cheaper, but you're spending hundreds of dollars to shoot hundreds of squirrels. You can afford it!

Thanks.

Wild Chefs!

A chic dark-phase red-tailed hawk (deep brown except for her brick-colored tail), was demonstrating ground squirrel prep on a power pole by the side of the Surprise Valley Road in Modoc County:

    Place your ground squirrel on top of the central pole.
    Remove portions of the squirrel and place them on either arm of the crossbar for more precise work.
    Stand on a crossbar arm, hold squirrel portion down with one talon, and shred squirrel with your beak.
    Eat squirrel bits. From time to time, pause and glare.
    To get from one arm of the crossbar to the other, spread your wings a little, and hop.
    Continue until you have eaten everything raptorially possible.
    When you are done, perch above the sign that says HIGH VOLTAGE and look noble.

Don't Insult Me with Your Smelt Net

When a hummingbird feels trapped, it tries to go up and out. Passionate little birds, they are not easily discouraged. They fling themselves against barriers again and again, nimbly avoiding any who try to capture them, heedless of hunger, thirst, and exhaustion, and heedless of people shouting, “Forget the skylight, dummy! Drop down a yard and you can fly out the bazzfazz door!”

They will do this till they drop unconscious. When they revive, they may notice another way out, or they may again try to shoulder their way out of the skylight. Sadly, even the cheesiest Home Debris skylight is too sturdy for this.

I've rescued four hummingbirds from possible death-by-skylight. One had flown into a miserable concrete bathroom structure at a beach. It was getting dark, the hut was unlit, and the only hope the bird perceived was to batter its way through the skylight. Rescue was a simple matter of clambering atop the stalls and ensnaring it in a T-shirt. (Okay, and convincing certain humans that it was a hummingbird and not the most humungous bee of all time.)

On another day, two had flown into a long overhanging veranda-but-this-is-California-so-we-call-it-a-deck and could not grasp that the skylight over the stairwell was not the way out. “There's two of us! And we're furious! No barrier can stand before us!” The skylight had a ledge below it, on which the hummingbirds would periodically drop in fatigue, acquiring nasty coats of dust and spiderwebs. Because this was over a deep stairwell, getting close enough to throw shirts over them was rather difficult.

The most recent needle-nosed fool flew into a kitchen and made the same old mistake. This was one of those amazing high-ceilinged kitchens with shelves up so far that giraffes can easily find food dishes, naturally with a large skylight, and retrieving this bird involved climbing a stepladder set on top of a granite-topped cooking island, and flailing gently with a long-handled smelt net and a tattered pool net.

The hummingbird, flagging but game, had no intention of flying into the smelt net, although he was willing to perch on its rim between assaults on the skylight. Finally he made the mistake of taking the smelt net for granted while avoiding the approach of the pool net, and he was snared. And forcibly escorted outside, and briefly admired, and allowed to fly off in a rage.

In which Reynard and Mr. Tod pass the Buffalo wings to Br'er Fox

My schedule is so cruel that I was able to go to only a few talks at the Wildlife Society's excellent 2009 conference, and to look at the posters. (This did however protect me from buying a coatimundi skull, a book on gibbons, and a radiocollar big enough for a bear.)

Even so, it was rewarding because so informative. Let me just say: you will log more fisher visits to your camera traps if you use actual bait. If you are translocating endangered birds from one side of Mauna Kea to the other, they may lose less weight in transit if you provide a wider variety of snacks during travel. Also, if you bought the conventional wisdom about imported red foxes occupying previously foxless lands, you might rethink in light of recent DNA evidence.

                                           

Fisher (Martes pennanti)

                        Palila (Loxioides bailleui) J. Jeffrey Photography

The traditional view has been that Europeans arrived on the east coast of the US, wailed that there were no red foxes, imported red foxes from Europe (suitable for hunting), and created an exuberant population of alien red foxes who spread out over the land. There were already clades of red foxes in the north and in the Rockies, but the invaders filled in the blanks on the map, occupying previously lightly-foxed lands .

A newer view hypothesized at the conference (goaded by a plea from an audience member, apparently a random crotchety blogger who had infiltrated the event) suggests that Europeans arrived on the east coast and saw no red foxes, yet foxes were probably there in modest numbers. The European immigrants imported red foxes, which vanished, leaving no traces in the DNA of the modern foxes sampled. But at the same time the Europeans altered the landscape in ways hospitable to the native red foxes (“Say, looks like they cut down that heavy forest and put in... a... can it be? It is, by cracky, it is! A chicken coop!”) Also they killed off fox-hostile species like wolves. It was by these acts, rather than by imports, that they created the exuberant population of red foxes.

“Tally-ho!” they cried, with completely misplaced self-esteem.

 Jim Thiele

Like furry spoons

There were two northern treeshrews in a glass-fronted cage in the National Museum in Washington, DC. The female scampered along a tangle of branches, up, down, over, under, back, up, over, down, over, down, etc.

I was busy myself, leaning on a wall and sneering at the sign. It identified the treeshrews and gave the remarkable fact that their milk is 25% fat, whereas human milk is only 4% fat – but it didn't say why. It said nothing of the amazing “absentee maternal system” (see 4/23/08 post). Since the babies only get one fast shot of milk every other day, there has to be enough fat in it to last them. Why didn't the sign mention that?

The slightly larger male treeshrew suddenly ran to the female. She waited as he sniffed urgently under her tail, and braced herself in place as he initiated a quick, vigorous sex act. Then she raced off to do some more scampering. The male scampered more slowly to another branch, sat, and looked around.

People passed by, glanced at the two treeshrews in the cage, said “rats” or “squirrels” and passed on. Occasionally someone read the sign and said “northern treeshrews.”

The male treeshrew focused on the female, scampered to her, sniffed, and initiated another speedy mating. As soon as it was over, the female dashed away again. The male would go sit on a branch until he once again found the female irresistible. In ten minutes, they mated eight times. One passing family glanced at the treeshrews, noticed the activity, and observed with interest until, apparently, it suddenly seemed to the mother that this might be unsuitable for her son (a kid of  8 or 9). “Rafael!* Come!” she said sharply, pushing the stroller to the next cage. (*I have changed this kid's name to protect the family and out of sheer mockery.)

Another woman with a stroller came by. She spotted the scandal, and sang fondly to her child, “Babies! There's gonna be babies! Baby chipmunks!”

Finally, the male treeshrew climbed to a high branch and lay down along it in a pose of utter exhaustion. The female, still energetic, did some scampering, glanced at the male, and hurtled up to the branch where he lay. She nestled up behind, put her front paws around him, and lay there holding him. There the two remained, quite still.

If you walked by and saw them then, it would have been a dull sight.

Photo: Guérin Nicolas

Spotty isn't really being challenged by the curriculum

Afternoon at the zoo. Fake savannah, real giraffes. Fake rocks, real plants. In a real crevice on top of a fake cliff, real weeds growing in real dust.

Child: “That giraffe is sleeping on the rock!” It did look as if the giraffe had approached the simulated sandstone cliff and laid her head along the top of it for a rest. Actually the giraffe was straining toward the weeds in the crevice, almost out of reach of her outstretched tongue.

They can't be that delicious. It must be a project.

Nature is greenish in mandible and tarsus

In turbulent times, I may turn to the garden for solace and calm, as on a recent afternoon.

Fondly I gazed on the gigantic rose bush. (An old Cecile Brunner, with small fragrant flowers: it needs no fertilizer, no insecticides, no watering; it simply goes about growing, blooming, and taking over the block. Occasionally enraged neighbors lop thorny branches that Cece has thrust through or over fences, and toss them back into our yard. Cece shrugs them off and continues struggling for conquest.)

More glumly, I noted infestation. Here and there were clusters of green aphids at the tips of young branches or on buds. Although the bush thrives, I disapprove of these sapsuckers. I surveyed nearby branches to see how many clusters were there.

I saw a ladybug and brightened. Ornamental! Widely mentioned in children's verse and literature! Sign of a healthy food web! I dollied in for a better look.

Shockingly, the ladybug had an aphid in its jaws. Long ago I was instructed that ladybugs eat aphids and that ecologically-minded gardeners encourage—even buy and release—ladybugs to control them, but never had I actually witnessed the predatory act.

The aphid waved its legs and feelers wildly. The ladybug had it firmly by the abdomen, and the aphid's head and front legs were free. I was glad I could not hear it shriek for help.

(A larger aphid at the tip of the bud turned. It headed toward where the lesser aphid was being eaten alive. It could not possibly be going to the rescue, though that's what it looked like. Suddenly it halted. Whether there were significant antenna gestures or expressions I'm not nearsighted enough to say, but the large aphid turned on its heels and marched back to the tip of the bud.)

To see something like this, a thing I have known about for so long, have told others about, have never questioned, but never seen—is startling. There's a little jolt at the moment when life as experienced matches up with as-told-to life. A pleasing jolt.

It's as if I was walking down Market and the guy at the table pushing Free Personality Tests was Tom Cruise. Superimposed, the image from movies and the face before my eyes would click together. The often-read information that Cruise is a Scientologist would slot into my personally-gleaned knowledge that such personality quizzes are Scientology recruitment bait. That would be cool.

But since I consider such recruitment a lower activity than sapsucking, or slowly consuming a suffering sapsucker, it's fortunate that I looked in the garden and not downtown for solace and calm.

A killer advances...

Where did I get this bracelet? It's a long story.

Curiosity killed the cat. I never heard exactly how. But The History of Borough Fen Decoy,  written by Tony Cook & R.E.M. Pilcher, explains how curiosity killed a lot of ducks. With the help of some dogs.

A decoy, in this sense, is not a fake duck meant to encourage real ducks to fly down and join it. It's a carefully designed pond with curved arms, meant to encourage ducks to hang out there in large numbers – and occasionally get netted at the end of an arm, also in large numbers. In the 1804-5 season they trapped “450 dozen and 8” ducks at Borough Fen Decoy. They sent those 5,408 ducks to be sold in London. You could make a lot of money with a decoy, and there were hundreds in England and Ireland, in suitable areas, such as the Fens.


                       (After Anne Treadwell-Cook, in Cook & Pilcher.)

They seem to have been invented in the Netherlands, and brought to the UK by the enterprising Sir W. Wodehouse, who lived in the early 1600s. (Surely a relative of the brilliant P.G. Wodehouse.) “Decoy” is an Anglicisation of “Eend-kooi,” which means “duck-trap.” Knowledgeable types, decoymen, would just call it a coy. Or kooi, if they were knowledgeable Dutch types.

The arms, or “pipes,” of the decoy are covered with high archways of local reeds, a pleasantly rustic effect. The banks are gently sloped, perfect for resting on while you doze or rearrange your plumage, if you are a duck. At the end it is a giant tunnel-net. There are reed screens along one side of the pipe, so you can sneak along without being seen by the ducks, if you are a decoyman. The screens have gaps between them, and are fanned, so “The final effect is that of a Venetian blind laid half-open on its side”.

                (Ineptly, after Anne Treadwell-Cook, in Cook & Pilcher.)

The pond is shallow, so as not to encourage diving ducks, which can get away too easily and which are considered inferior eating. It is kept clear of reeds, to discourage ducks from skulking there, and its banks are steep and uncomfortable.

The simplest way to catch ducks in a decoy is to notice that there are a bunch of ducks relaxing in one of the pipes, probably because you laid out a nice duck-food buffet there the night before. (You selected the pipe in accordance with the wind direction, since ducks don't like to take off with the wind behind them.) You suddenly pop out from behind a screen near the mouth of the pipe, the horrified ducks flee down the pipe, you bound along and pop out at the next gap, chasing them, and they fly into the net or “bunch huddled together,” at the end. A twist of the net traps them all. Because of the Venetian blind effect, ducks in the pipe could see you, but ducks in the pond could not.

But often the ducks don't go far enough into the pipes to make this a fruitful endeavor, even though food is there. This is where the dog comes in. Instead of scaring ducks further down the pipe with the sight of your ghastly self, you entice them into the pipe by giving them glimpses of the dog. You send the dog over a low “dog-jump” between screens, and it runs down the bank of the pipe and disappears over the jump behind the next screen.

Wak? What was that? The ducks swim a little further down the pipe, stretching their necks to see what's going on. Wak?

Meanwhile you sneak behind the screen and signal the dog to go over the next jump at the right moment. The ducks pursue. Wak! Wak! Did you see that?

Wak! I saw it again! Hurry! Wak wak wak!

When the ducks are far enough down the pipe, you show your scary self, the ducks panic and rush down the pipe, and are netted as before.

Why do the ducks follow the dog? One explanation is that they are curious. They want to know more. Animals generally want to know what is going on in their world. Plains Indians used to lure pronghorns within arrowshot by lying in tall grass and waving a stick with a cloth on it. The antelope just had to find out what that thing was.

And if there's a predator sneaking around it would be nice to know what kind of predator it is and where and what it's doing. Traditionally decoy dogs are supposed to look like foxes – small, ginger-coated, bushy-tailed dogs. (Tradition has been flouted by the use of yellow labs, white terriers, and “a large Newfoundland-type” dog. Also a cat. Sir Ralph Payne-Gallwey experimented with a rabbit, a ferret, and a monkey he borrowed from an organ-grinder. But you should use a small ginger dog and you should name it Piper.)

More than curiosity, the ducks may feel the urge to mob the probable predator. When animals mob a predator, they surround it in a crowd, make as much noise as they can, and maybe peck at it. This might seem risky, but it's common. If you hear a tremendous shrieking of birds in the forest, you may find a cloud of small birds mobbing a hawk or an owl. The hawk or owl is made miserable and knows it has no chance of taking any prey creature by surprise, so it flies off, pursued by shrieks. At my sister's farm the guinea fowl have been heard and seen mobbing a bobcat and a coyote, each of which ran away. So the ducks in the decoy may be planning to catch up with that dog or fox or whatever it is (that can't be a monkey? – wak!) and hassle it. They would wave pitchforks if they could.

Most decoys are long gone. Borough Fen hasn't been used to catch ducks for sale since the early 1950s. The Wildfowl Trust, under famous ornithologist Sir Peter Scott, turned it into a bird-ringing station. Ducks are caught, banded, and released, in the pursuit of knowledge about their migrations. Cook and Pilcher proudly write “There is one recovery of a Teal from Turkey.”

The decoy doesn't work as well when ornithologists run it. The trouble is that banded ducks remember. They hang about near the mouth of the pipe making worried noises. They won't go in, and other ducks, “sensing the disquiet of their experienced fellows,” also become unenthusiastic. Major criminals have a rule: Leave No Witnesses. This is probably why we don't know what happened to that cat.