The Nature of the Beast (according to Susan McCarthy)

Ugh, paparazzi

Sometimes you see a barn and you know it has owls. 

This one is airy, with many escape  routes. As we walked to the door, a barn owl (Tyto alba) silently flew out.

A helpful person had put up an owl box. Owls had accepted it. Not recently, judging by the size of the charnel scatter of debris below, full of fragile white bones of rodents.

An owlet looked out. I think it was worried, maybe horrified. But it wasn't too frightened to stare.

Not all barns are suitable for owl nesting. When a barn is otherwise good but has no owl box, owls may nest on a corner between rafters.

This old barn is so great that I think it would have an owl nest even without the box. It's made of solid beams and planks, strongly joined.

Before there were barns, these owls nested in natural places like holes in trees. Humans have reduced the number of trees (and many humans object to trees with holes in them, with the notion that such trees are diseased, unsound, and liable to drop heavy limbs onto humans including small beloved children running through the park to raise awareness for kidney disease).
 

However, we have put up barns which can be nested in. Barns attract rodents, useful to barn owls, since an owl family may eat more than a thousand in a year.

Barn owls evolved hunting in meadows and along forest edges and nesting in trees. Some still do so, but others hunt on agricultural land and nest in agricultural buildings. We're not completely useless to owls.
  

Even if we give them the creeps. 

Really? I'm not from around here, either

San Francisco's wild parrots, subjects of a very nice book and movie, are famously “of Telegraph Hill.” But sometimes a few appear over my obscure Ingleside neighborhood where they land in the trees, shrieking. I have seen a flock of eight, and family groups of four. They are cherry-headed conures (Aratinga erythrogenys), native to Ecuador and Peru. 

One evening I came up the side porch steps from the basement and startled a parrot into a desperate squawking getaway.

It had to have been in my ridiculous philodendron, in which I have never before or since seen any bird.

This is a cast-off house plant my mother forced me to take when she moved out of town. I really didn't want it. It was scrawny, with two or three leaves. I put it on the side porch to die. I didn't plan for it to die, but I was sure it would. This side porch is a space mashed between our house and the next, enclosed on four sides, open to the sky, rather mossy. It's a sort of glorified air shaft containing stairs from the kitchen down to the basement. Apparently this protects the *#!*%^$& philodendron, which is now six feet tall and fruits. It  subsists mostly on fog drip, though I occasionally feed it cooled-off  water from steaming vegetables.
 
So apparently the tropical parrot found the tropical plant and the two were drawn together in what I now realize is a tiny tropical enclave. It  would be a shame to neglect this excellent microclimate. There's not enough space to install tapirs but maybe some arrow-poison frogs could enjoy themselves there.

Cool.  I thought that was just squawking, but apparently it was a message of wacky possibility. Dare to dream, earthbound human!

Whatcha got in the barrel, George?

According to the newspaper Daffy Duck reads, “The TASMANIAN DEVIL is a powerful, vicious, evil-tempered brute... hungry at all times... it will eat anything but is especially fond of wild duck.”

In creating the character of Taz, Warner Brothers was building on precedent. The person who described the Tasmanian devil (Sarcophilus harrisi) for science, in 1807, surveyor/naturalist George Harris, told the world how ferocious, fiendish, savage -- “uncontrollably wild” -- devils were.

He wrote, “They bite frequently and snarl and bark loudly.”

But here's how he knew. He had two devils. He kept them in a barrel. Chained together. They are nocturnal, and slept all day, while Harris was writing insulting things about them. They woke up when it got dark and discovered they were still chained together in a barrel. They fought and shrieked all night, when Harris probably planned to sleep. Perhaps he felt that if he had been chained to another guy, in a barrel, he would have remained quiet and sweet.

Tasmanian devils still have a terrible reputation. People call them vicious and impossible to tame. But Grzimek's Animal Life Encyclopedia, where I first learned about Harris and his barrel, also mentions a person who had two pet devils whom he leashed and took for walks. And there was no trail of bloody bodies behind them, even when he took them to Melbourne.

Others say they are “delightful and affectionate pets.” When not chained in a barrel. It's easy to find video of devils scampering across verandahs, hanging from sleeves like Jack Russell terriers, or in one remarkable clip, nestling in a zookeeper's arms and being persuaded to relax her pouch to reveal two infant devils (imps?) clinging blindly to her nipples.

It's true that Tasmanian devils yell a lot, specializing in a noise that's partly screaming and partly retching. Carrying on at night is how  they got called devils in the first place. They are not as timid as people like wild animals to be.
 
They hold an ecological niche—that of a small scavenging carnivore—that gets bad press even without the shrieking at night and George Harris slandering them. (Also: chicken-snatchers.) Essentially they are marsupial wolverines. And you know how people talk  about wolverines (Gulo gulo). For some reason people enjoy the idea of a small demonic animal and promote the legend of its savagery.

I once met two hand-raised wolverines. The minute they saw you they rushed up scrabbling over each other to lick your hands (and see if you had been nice enough to bring snacks). Like puppies, they loved to be rubbed and scratched. I'd love to meet devils raised that way, with affection. And no barrel.

Dinner in Paradise

In the middle of California's broad Central Valley, the Sutter Buttes rear up, surrounded by flatness on all sides. Because the craggy volcanic buttes just barely beat 2,000 feet, the place is sometimes called the world's smallest mountain range. On an elevation map, like this, courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey, the Buttes are that bump in the Central Valley, halfway up the northern end.

The whole of the Sutter Buttes is only 75 square miles, essentially all private property in the form of a dozen ranches. Because it doesn't have year-round water, and is apparently hell-hot in summer, it has escaped most development. The place's isolation in the middle of the lower elevation flats make it an island, with odd wildlife distribution results. It's apparently a hotbed of ringtails, for instance.

It is so small that devotees like Walt Anderson, the author of Inland Island: The Sutter Buttes, can tell you that there is exactly one ponderosa pine there, on North Butte. It is so well-documented that Anderson can also report that in 1988 a flock of 32 white pelicans, a species otherwise only seen flying far overhead, descended to a stock pond to feast on goldfish swimming there.

Some ranchers in the Buttes allow limited access for hikers. Recently I went on a hike offered by the Middle Mountain Foundation. It was a mild fall day, so clear we could see Mount Lassen 80 miles away. We could also see urban lands, starting very close by and stretching down to Sacramento.

In a place so close to intense civilization, there was no litter. None. No bags, no bottles, no cans. There were no other hikers. Aside from old stone walls running across the hills, there were no direct signs of human activity until we got to some ranch buildings on the way out. But there were indirect traces, for the land is full of cattle and wild pigs. There were two sizes of hoof prints, cow patties, and areas of torn earth where the pigs had been rooting.

The cattle are raised for profit. The pigs, introduced long ago, are popular with many California hunters as a big game species. Yes, I eat beef, and occasionally wild boar.

Those beautiful, quiet lands were uncanny. It's a place where people rarely go, yet you can turn your head and see where hundreds of thousands of people are. There's not so much as a bottle cap on the ground, yet the land is strongly marked by pastoral industry. This eerie place is a domain of meat.

Sparrow, Butterfly, Butterfly, Tomato

In late summer successful gardeners become superbly generous, even pushy. The fields of California burst with extra tomatoes. All over the Central Valley, tomato trucks bomb along blazing hot roads. You know they are tomato trucks because they have open tops and spill tomatoes, especially on bumps and curves. Roads with tomato-spangled corners mean the end of summer.

                                                              you can spot summer[Carl McCabe http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/]

These tomatoes aren't meant to be sold by the each. They'll be pounded, concentrated, and purified into sauce and catsup, so if they get smashed on the ride to the plant or a few hundred get lost, it doesn't matter. Abundance brings carelessness.

Last weekend we were driving through the Valley. It was hot, hot, hot. On a back road we slowed when a flight of sparrows rose from a scatter of spilled tomatoes. Suddenly the air was full of yellow butterflies.

They were Orange Sulphur butterflies (Colias eurytheme). As butterflies they drink nectar, but when they're children (caterpillars), they eat plants in the pea family, especially alfalfa. They're a native species that hit a bonanza when humans started planting alfalfa. In a paper about exotic crops that please local butterflies, Graves & Shapiro write that you can spot summer alfalfa fields from a long way away by the yellow clouds of butterflies.

Singly and in revolving pairs, they fluttered across the road, heedless of cars and trucks. We expected this to be a passing thing, but as we kept driving, they kept swooping over the road, through the burning air, crashing against windshields and grilles.

With so many butterflies, the number killed by cars is unimportant to the species. But we couldn't bear the havoc, so we turned back to another road, more traveled by people, less traveled by butterflies.

Red and yellow scatters, on the ground, in the air. An explosion of abundance and abandon, and summer's over.

The Fox and the Bear

For many years my friend Mary Lynn Fischer lived with QuickView, an Arctic Fox (Alopex lagopus). Quickie's immediate family had been raised for the exotic pet trade; her ancestors just before that were bred for fur farms; and before that they had been wild.

Quickie herself was both tame and wild. When you came over to the house, Quickie was liable to give you a horrified look and vanish for the rest of your visit. But you might also be eating dinner and feel little forepaws on your back when Quickie hopped up on the back of furniture to peer over your shoulder and see what you were eating.

Mary built a cage with zoo-level security in order to get a Fish & Game permit to possess a wild animal, and she lived in fear that the government would one day decide that people shouldn't be able to keep wildlife in suburbia and confiscate Quickie. At any given moment Quickie might be in the cage, or she might be playing with the dog, curled up on the bed, or requesting admission to her favorite cranny, the freezer compartment of the refrigerator.

Mary has an intellectual as well as an emotional interest in animals (and a great deal of first-hand knowledge). Here's part of an email she recently sent me about her relationship with Quickie:

For years I had wondered about the well known propensity of Alopex to taming. People have  come up with all sorts of theories about it, but the truth is more interesting than one might think.

Arctic Foxes tend to find and attach themselves to Polar Bears, who tend to hate Arctic Foxes. The fox follows the bear and scavenges from the bear's kills. From the fox's perspective, I guess, it's a symbiosis. From the bear's, it's a nuisance.

I examined pictures of the lives of these two coexistent creatures doing whatever it is that they do, over the years, and then it struck me: The fox shadows the bear, wakes the bear up when it sleeps in. ("Wake up! Wake up y'ol' bear! It's time to rise and shine and fetch me breakfast!") The bears grit their teeth at these ministrations. They seem not to particularly dote on their foxes, but the foxes adore their bears. They understand perfectly how useful a large predator can be. There are even pictures of Arctic Foxes fighting over "custody" of a particular bear ("Hey! This is MY bear. Go get your own bear!") When they find an unattached bear they shadow him or her, just out of paw range—actually a rather large distance. They wait until the bear makes a kill. Then they stand about thinking how hungry they are until the bear has had a surfeit and goes to sleep, whereat they take their tithe.

The bear surely does not miss the amount that an Alopex extracts on a good year. It's the principle of the thing. Some bears are relatively tolerant and good humored. Still others look darkly at the fox hovering nearby, and attempt to sleep on top of the carcass, to prevent the fox from even thinking of taking a bit. This does not work. Every now and then, a bear---goaded beyond everything that is holy by the cheek of the little foxes, has been observed to try to take a swipe at them.

My entire life with Quickie was marked by occasional explosions when Whit forgot yet again, and put his slippers beside the bed.  And then there would be the sight of a very happy fox, rushing off importantly with slippers dangling from her mouth, with Whit in hot pursuit.  He never learned. After a while, he took to buying the particular cheap slippers he fancied by the case. It's amazing how quickly a small animal with jaws like a machine vise can get through a case of rubber huaraches. And of course, he had trained her. Because Quickie thought it was wonderful. She didn't quite understand why this was true, but all she had to do was to steal his slippers, and no matter how tired Whit was, he'd rise like Lazarus from the grave, uttering terrible threats ("you'd make up into a great pair of mittens!") and chase her. And chase games are the one thing that little foxes worldwide love. 

This symbiotic relationship with foxes is not limited to the high arctic. The foxes in the Israeli desert loved to shadow hyenas in troops, and the hyenas felt about them the same way that the Polar Bears felt about Alopex. Yet Macdonald relates that few hyenas could be seen without a retinue of foxes at their heels. Occasionally, one of them got much too cheeky, and ended up inside the hyena. But that was rare. I don't think anyone has witnessed a Polar Bear actually getting its fox, but it wasn't for want of trying.

Reflecting on this one day, and weighing all the scientific speculation about the ease with which Alopex can be tamed, I had a sudden realization. Quickie took to captivity the way a duck takes to water. She loved it. She used to look nervously over her shoulder at the spectre of freedom, it seemed to me. She loved standing in front of me in the kitchen, and describing by her glances and little cries, just what it was that she wanted from me. That was when I got it:

I was the fox's bear.

What Shall I Do with These Opposable Thumbs?

A few years ago, Terri Nelson and I went to the San Francisco Zoo, and came upon the Nocturnal Gallery. This is closed now, but it was a little building with glass-fronted cages with small primates. It was dark inside, with double doors so people entering  wouldn't let in daylight. There were dim red lights. If you waited long enough, your eyes would adjust and you could dimly see small nocturnal animals hustling along tree branches, sorting leaf litter, and grooming each other. Most people didn't take the time, and went out again. We were alone with tiny primates.

Terri and I were spellbound. Bushbabies! Then we saw the mouse lemurs, infinitesimal primates you could hold in the palm of your hand, if it were allowed. We felt compelled to peer at them in case there was a still smaller baby mouse lemur clinging to its mother.

Then we spotted the aye-ayes, and were stunned with delight. Aye-ayes are rare and endangered, five and a half pounds of nocturnal weirdness from Madagascar. Few zoos have them. Aye-ayes eat grubs that burrow in decayed wood, so they fill the ecological niche of a woodpecker. (A big woodpecker. Given their size and rarity, let's say an Ivory-billed Woodpecker.) They have opposable thumbs and skinny witchy fingers, especially their middle fingers, which are ridiculously long, Edward Scissorhands long. In the Malagasy night, they tap on trees, listening with big bat ears for hollow sounds, and for a grub squirming. Then they bite a hole in the wood and pull the nutritious and no doubt tasty grub out with that long middle finger.*

In the dimness of the nocturnal house we could see the aye-ayes parading along horizontal branches, making daring leaps from one branch to branch, and pausing so we could drink in the spectacle of their crazy staring eyes, their disheveled fur, and those bizarre hands. They popped in and out of a wooden nestbox.

We had been looking silently for a long time, bewitched, when we saw a quick flash in the enclosure. It was a red bar of light that appeared for a second and then was gone. It came again. “Did you see that?” “Yes -- what was it?” We stared. Nothing. Then, again, from a different spot. We couldn't figure it out. Were there lights in the enclosure with the aye-ayes? Some kind of motion detectors? It flashed from a different spot. Then, gone.

It flashed twice, in the same spot. We peered and suddenly saw an aye-aye sitting on a branch. Facing us. Brandishing a large wrench.

“Do you see that?!” one of us asked in disbelief, and the other one hissed, “Yes.”

When the wrench was tilted toward a red light, it reflected a red bar of light from the handle. The flashes from different places must have come as the aye-aye paraded around with the wrench. The aye-aye manipulated the wrench thoughtfully, then jumped up and disappeared into the nestbox. When it came out, it had no wrench.

We tried to figure it out. When one of the cages was being repaired, someone had left a wrench lying around. The aye-ayes had stolen it. They were hiding it in the nestbox. Clearly they planned a break-out. “They plan to use it to unbolt something and escape,” I hazarded. Terri showed a better understanding of basic primate thinking. “They plan to hit the zookeeper on the head with it and escape,” she said.

*There are no woodpeckers in Madagascar. Feel free to use this remark the next time conversation falters.