The Nature of the Beast (according to Susan McCarthy)

We love our stinky kids

The story about the smelly babies isn't true. Birds don't reject their nestlings if people have handled them and gotten human scent all over them. Most birds can't smell much, anyway. (But don't say this around a vulture. Or a kiwi. Or a fulmar.)

 I don't know how this story got started, but I certainly heard it  when I was a kid. Somehow it had an appalling plausibility –  our very touch turns innocent babies to pariahs.

(Not the actual baby robins I'm talking about.)

Fortunately for three small birds I met recently, it's nonsense. These robin nestlings fell out of their nest on a windy morning. They hit the sidewalk uninjured, and a kind passer-by picked them up (intelligently noting the address) and took them to the nearest animal shelter. The shelter had the expertise, and the feeding formula, to take care of the young birds. But they knew the best upbringing for robins comes from robins. They had eight million things to do besides feeding screaming baby robins every 20 minutes. A wildlife rescue organization would try to get the robins back to their parents.

 I'd been told that the best thing to do for uninjured baby birds is to get them back up in their nest, or near their nest, or at least up in the branches of their tree out of cat-reach, and let their parents take care of them. I believed it. But I had never done it. (What if it were as false as the human-stink story?)

We inspected the site. With the address, we could identify the home tree, but it was leafy and no nest could be seen. Besides, that nest was clearly a slipshod dealio that baby robins fell out of in a high wind, a flimsy sieve, a deathtrap. We'd have to rig up a substitute. The worrying part was that there didn't seem to be any robins there. The parents were supposed to be hanging around calling for their children. But no. No one was around but blackbirds. By this time the babies had been away most of the day. Had the parents given up? 

 We thought we'd try anyway, so we went to get the chicks. They were past the naked blob stage, into the partially-feathered lump stage. They were starting to have robin faces. Maybe a week from fledging, they were correctly-behaved bird children. They alternated between gaping and screeching, twittering softly, and squatting silent and motionless like little lumps of ugly. The shelter gave them a feeding, which would last them in case their parents never returned and we had to bring them back.

Back at the tree, we scanned for robins. Nothing. Using a ladder, we wired a plastic tub into the branches, making sure it wouldn't tip in the wind like certain shoddy constructions. We'd made drainage holes so liquid couldn't collect in it. That was the nest. The shelter staff had made a nice lining with pine needles and bits of a feather duster. While the wiring took place, the nestlings hunkered low inside, pretending not to exist.  

 We took the ladder away and looked around. No robins. We peered around with binoculars. Nothing but blackbirds. We crossed the street and sat on a bench and looked. No robins. So we got in the car and drove away, but then came back, and parked across the street, taking advantage of robins' inability to read license plates or tell a Delorean from a Hupmobile. We stayed in the car. Blackbirds flew over the tree, perched on a wire above the tree, and squeaked at other blackbirds, but there were no robins.  

 Until suddenly there was a silent robin in the tree next to the nest tree. With something in its bill. It silently dived into the nest tree. It had been 16 minutes since we walked away from the tree.

To be sure it was true, we walked down the other side of the street, crossed, and casually walked under the tree, glancing up for just a second as we did. An adult robin was perched – silently – two feet from the nest tub.

 It makes sense that parent birds would approach the nest without making giveaway sounds, but I'm still amazed that they so quickly detected that their kids were back (in a nearby location, with a new pre-fab house) and resumed food deliveries.

 Mostly, I'm delighted that they overlooked the fact that the kids must have reeked of rescuer stink.

 

Follow-up:

I went by the nest tree about two weeks after we put it up. Since the young robins had been about a week from fledging, I wasn't worried about disturbing things. Everything was the same. The nest was still up there, if you looked, and no robins were in sight. I was relieved that the plastic nest hadn't been distubed.

Going back later to remove the nest, I saw that the tree had been heavily pruned since the last visit. It was no longer a thickly-leaved place where you could hide a nest. Whoever had pruned the tree had carefully left the plastic nest. It was a touching gesture, although the nest was now too exposed to be safe. I was very glad that the pruning had happened after the babies had fledged. I took the nest down and examined the lining. It appeared well used.

Babies are often brought into rescue centers when trees being pruned or felled turn out to have nests -- baby birds, squirrel pups, dragonets.* It's better to prune out of nesting season.

Early this morning, I went back to look for young robins, and saw this squirt in the little park across the street. The spots on the feathers show that this bird fledged this year and hasn't gone through the preformative molt yet -- that it's just a child.

It could be some other robins' child, but it's the right age and the right place to be one of the three rescued fledglings.

 

(*Okay, probably not dragonets.)

 

Mightypants

 

I haven't been bitten by a rattlesnake, except in nightmares. Once in southeast Arizona it was close. For some reason I was about to clamber up a small rock face. It was hot, and insects were buzzing, and it suddenly struck my companion that one insect buzzing on the rock face might actually be a snake. Indeed, a very small rattlesnake on a very small ledge was issuing a warning so small that I had taken it for a bug's advertisement.

 I have been threatened by other rattlesnakes, but never at biting distance. Several times I have been part of a team making a rattler get off a nice warm back-country road where it was planning to bake for a while. Those snakes tended to rattle savagely when chased into the chilly brush, not realizing that we were trying to save their lives.

 

But rattlesnakes appear in my nightmares sometimes, and they are ferocious then, biting repeatedly, biting multiple persons, biting the worst possible body parts.

 

Since when I am mooching around rattlesnake country, I am usually wearing jeans, and subject to the derision of shorts-wearers, I was interested to learn that jeans provide partial protection against snakebite. Shelton Herbert and William Hayes, of Loma Linda University, writing in the Annals of Emergency Medicine, describe an experiment in which they induced rattlesnakes to bite “model human limbs” and measured the amount of venom injected if the limb was bare or covered with denim.

The model human limbs were latex household gloves filled with warm water and dangled from a snake hook. There were 15 rattlesnakes, large and small. Each session began with 5 seconds of “noncontact harassment,” type unspecified. (Waving the snake hook? Stamping on the ground? Taunting?) Then the model limb was thrust near the snake. They did this until the snake bit the model once, or until fifteen minutes had passed.

Snakes are all different. Two snakes couldn't be bothered to bite at all. Five times a snake managed to get in two bites before they whipped away the glove. (Auditioning to be in my nightmares.)

  

Anyway, it turns out that denim makes it harder for rattlers to inject venom. About two-thirds harder. They still bit, but less venom got in. It sounds like their fangs got stuck. A lot of venom just came out on the denim. And the small snakes often didn't manage to inject venom at all. Perhaps there were “kinematic difficulties associated with venom delivery.”

 “Wearing long denim pants as an alternative to shorts may provide a simple, low-cost means of reducing the severity of snakebites,” say Herbert & Hayes.

Yay! (Although there are so many details missing in this paper. What kind of denim? Brand new? Stone washed? Acid washed? We're not talking jeggings, are we?)

 Herbert & Hayes speculate that the “protective effect might be even greater for the comparatively short-fanged elapid and venomous colubrid snakes, which warrants further study.” I am too busy to take up the torch and do that study, so let's just hope jeans thwart them too.

 Let no one tell you that jeans are not appropriate attire for every event. It is unlikely that you will encounter a bitter, frightened, or unhappy rattlesnake in most places, but it is still nice to know that you are prepared if you do.

 I intend to wear jeans in my dreams from now on.

 

Another can't-miss plan

Deer, bears, and chipmunks were excellent aspects of my summer camp experience. Then there was the frog relocation scheme. Sometimes – often – and I now realize that at these times we were probably supposed to be in the crafts A-frame or playing volleyball by the lake or rehearsing for the talent show – we would prowl the creek that flowed from Mosquito Lake, catching frogs. Catching frogs is hugely fun. Unless you are frogs.

We meant them no harm, and always released them. We just enjoyed the hunt, and pitting our amphibian-capture capabilities against their mammal-eluding capabilities. Sometimes amphibians won, sometimes mammals won.

 Frogs have a tactic in which they leap off a bank (often with a charming croak or yelp), dart to mud at the bottom of the creek, and freeze in place, holding their breath. This can work well to prevent detection, especially if there is enough mud to bury the frog. In Mosquito Creek, there was often insufficient mud, and we would crouch on the banks, only a few feet from the frog, staring at it as it hunkered in plain view on the creek bottom. The frog would regard us from lovely gold-laced eyes, perhaps thinking itself triumphantly hidden. 

 Slowly, slowly, the frog hunter would lower a hand into the water, slowly so as not to alarm the frog, not to trigger its motion-detecting neurons, though still visible to it, and slowly slowly maneuver to be close enough to snatch it. Ha!

 Then you have a frog, and after you have admired its beauty, what to do?

 A pool in a stream is made more beautiful by a frog on its banks. Some pools had two or three frogs, riches indeed. It seemed to us that if a pool with one frog was good, and a pool with two or three frogs was great, a pool with, say, twelve frogs would be completely fabulous.*

 We found the finest frog pool on the stream, and rearranged it to be even better, and then went up and down the stream capturing frogs and relocating them to the perfect pool. They would swim to the bottom and hide themselves and we would go off in search of more frogs.

 We'd return, expecting to find the pool thickly jeweled with frogs all around its gorgeous banks. But no. Maybe they were still hiding. We would release our latest prisoners and try again.

 But to our chagrin, all frogs immediately repatriated themselves, so we were never able to achieve our dream of a heavily befrogged pool. (I know. We were ten.)

 Fortunately frogs weren't involved when we invented a new game, Army Corps of Engineers.

 

(*Or, as we eloquently phrased it, really neat.)

   

 

 

 

 

Shared food, shared beds

Trying to get close to deer is one thing. There were some animals in that forest that it was wiser not to get close to, and others who thought it might be good to get close to us. Bears were in the first category – we were afraid of them – and luckily not in the second category.

 One camper went off by himself, and just about bumped into a bear. Terrified, he ran away. Terrified, the bear ran the other way. When the kid stopped running he was seriously lost. When the camp noticed he was gone, there was a huge search. There was even a helicopter. He was located and rescued the next day. (How this played out for the bear we never knew. But definitely no helicopter.)

 I didn't see bears there myself, but sometimes we saw bear signs. Once when we went on an overnight hike, a bear dropped by, removed a locked cabinet from a tree where it had been hung, tore it open, and ate our cornflakes. I was astonished, since I had a low opinion of cornflakes. Why bother?

Other animals were more willing to get close to campers. A certain chipmunk commandeered a camper's sleeping bag, probably because the camper was storing quasi-illicit candy and snacks in there. The stuffing also pulled out well and quickly made up into a splendid chipmunk bed.

 When the camper got in her bag and discovered the chipmunk, the chipmunk did not flee. It was willing to share. But when the camper attempted to evict the chipmunk, the chipmunk was annoyed, and bit, and we all found out about the whole sordid story, and rabies shots were insisted on. 

Have I mentioned what a great camp this was? There were wild animals, and there was drama.

 

Act casual, act vegetarian

I figured out how to get close to deer at summer camp. It was a great camp, where we slept outside and cooked our own meals. A wilderness camp, except not the kind where they force you to belay off things.

 The forest was full of black-tailed deer (Odocoileus columbianus), including does with fawns. I had never seen so many, never so close. In the fall, there was hunting in this forest. As we campers blundered along, deer would fling up their heads, stare, and take off running and bounding.

I ached to get closer. I tried freezing when a deer spotted me. I would freeze, they would freeze – and then they'd run. One day, instead of freezing, I looked away, leaned over and examined a manzanita bush, tugged at a leaf, pretended to eat it. I glanced around and the deer were still there. After a while they put their heads down and started eating again. They'd look around from time to time, but stayed calm.

This casual attitude turned out to be the way to allay their fears. Don't stare like a predator, don't go out of sight (like a lurking predator), just act like a fellow grazer. I may have hammed it up unnecessarily, assessing and rejecting leaves, snorting daintily, looking around wide-eyed for mountain lions, shaking off hypothetical flies, but if the deer thought I was emoting too much, they didn't say.

 Herbivores often hang out with other species of herbivores. There's safety in numbers. The deer didn't think I was a deer, but they did seem to think I was a creature behaving in a way they understood, a non-dangerous way.

 I tried moving closer, browsing as I went. That worked too. It was shocking how close they'd let me get. But then I'd get too close, and my un-deerlike nature would become too obtrusive, and they'd sail away.

(All I wanted to do was get close. But if I had gotten closer, I would have wanted to pet them and scratch them at the base of their ears. And if they had let me do that, I would probably have tried to pick ticks off them, and move their ears around like antennae picking up station KDOE, and the next thing they knew I would have been trying to get them to chase sticks. I do see that they had to draw the line somewhere.)

 People have been trying to get close to deer for predatory purposes for a long time. Before guns came to North America, getting within bowshot of deer was something people schemed to do far more often than they do today.

 Apparently just acting innocent wasn't enough, because Indians across the country had developed this to a high art. They had deer outfits. Made of deerskin.

 Thomas Jefferson Mayfield, (previously blogged about) described how the Choinumne who partly raised him did this. “[T]hey prepared the horns and hide of the deer and placed them over themselves. The head of the deer was hollowed out and was fitted over the head of the hunter. The skin covered the back of the hunter.”

 Then they went into their vegetarian act. “A short stick was carried in the right hand and was used to imitate the forelegs of a deer when the hunter bent forward. The bow and arrows were carried in the left hand. He would imitate a deer feeding and rubbing his horns on the brush, and many other actions of the deer, until he approached quite close to the game. Sometimes the hunter would work an hour to get just ten feet closer to the deer.”

 Here's an illustration of how the Timucua, of what's now Florida and Georgia, did this.

 In The Way We Lived: California Indian Reminiscences, Stories and Songs, a Pomo woman talking about the hunting exploits of her grandfather, says “My grandfather said he put the deer head on when he want to go out hunting. He used to go out among the deer.”

 Apparently the deer let him get close, but they couldn't quite figure him out. “The deer wanted to smell his behind.”

 Yes, yes, a hazard all spies and double agents face. What to do, Mr. Bond? “He always just turn around and sit down.”

 There are modern bowhunters who also wish to get close to deer. While I am only slightly informed on this subject, I gather they generally have high-tech bows. They dress in camouflage, not in deer suits. And like me, they don't get so close that they have to sit down.

 

 

Mystery pigeon

I was reading Indian Summer, by Thomas Jefferson Mayfield, an account of the years Mayfield was raised among the Choinumne Indians of California.

 It's an interesting account, which includes a description of an ingenious traditional method of pigeon hunting. This involved building a blind from which one could snare pigeons with thin nooses. It had to be built in the right place, where pigeons would come to drink at dawn. “They liked to water at a spring or water hole near tall trees, especially pines. They... all tried to water at the same hole,” Mayfield wrote. “They would light in such numbers that sometimes they would strip the limbs from the trees. It would take these large flights from one to three hours to water. When they left a water hole, it was as badly drained and trampled as though a thousand sheep had watered there.”

That sounded oddly familiar. Huge destructive flocks of pigeons breaking branches off trees with the weight of their numbers? I'd heard that before – but it was always about passenger pigeons (Ectopistes migratorius).

“When they alighted on the trees their weight was so heavy that not only big limbs and branches of the size of a man's thigh were broken straight off, but less firmly rooted trees broke down completely under the load,” wrote Pehr Kalm, in 1759, of the “marvelous multitudes” of passenger pigeons.

I had learned this in a 1911 issue of The Auk, the journal of the American Ornithologist's Union. (Which I was reading at the exceedingly cool Prelinger library, where they have amazing old journals as well as books.) This sad issue was dedicated to the passenger pigeon, describing a bird that seemed to be extinct in the wild (and would soon be extinct in captivity) – but holding out the hope that there might be a few left.

The AOU had offered rewards for passenger pigeon nests – and been deluged with mourning dove nests. “It now looks as if the worst fears of the American naturalists... [are] confirmed, and that we are 'in at the death' of the finest race of pigeons the world has produced,” wrote C. F. Hodge.

Wallace Craig described the calls of passenger pigeons as he remembered them, in hopes that this might help people find survivors. “[I]f you tell a boy to look for a bird of the same general appearance as the Mourning Dove but larger, he will be sure to mistake some large-appearing Mourning Dove for the Passenger Pigeon. But tell him to look for a pigeon that shrieks and chatters and clucks instead of cooing, and the boy will be less likely to make a mistake.” Among other calls, Craig describes the keck, the
kah-of-excitement, and the keeho. He provides musical notation for pigeons he observed in an aviary, including  the notes given by the male “when just about to tickle female's head.” The last passenger pigeon died in 1914 at the Cincinnati Zoo. Martha, she was called.

Wait, so what did Mayfield see? Passenger pigeons ranged North American forests east of the Rockies. They were never in California. Mayfield just called the birds the Choinumne hunted “pigeons.” I think these were band-tailed pigeons (Patagioenas fasciata), birds which are hunted in California to this day. They live in forests west of the Rockies. 

Mourning doves also occur in California – and across the continent – and are also hunted. But they prefer open and semi-open country. I've never heard of their flocks breaking branches.

I wondered if band-tailed pigeons were a west-of-the-Rockies version of that east-of-the-rockies bird, the passenger pigeon. Putting the names of both pigeons into a search engine, I saw that a brand-new study of pigeon and dove DNA had been published in Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution. Contrary to the previous belief that the passenger pigeon's closest relative is the mourning dove (pointy-tailed, both of them), the study found that the band-tailed pigeon is the closest relative.

Kevin Johnson, one of the authors of the study, makes the point that a band-tail is not super-closely related to a passenger pigeon. "This bird is pretty diverged from its nearest relatives, meaning it had a unique place in the world. It represented a unique lineage that's now gone," he told Science Daily.

Well, obviously. A band-tail doesn't even have a pointy tail. Nevertheless, this is the closest thing we have left to a passenger pigeon and I plan to cherish the species on that basis.

It seems I am not the only one who find band-tails a workable substitute for passenger pigeons. Passenger pigeons were afflicted with a species of bird louse. Because the species was described only in 1937 (by  Malcomson – I shall call it Malcomson's bird louse) and because it was believed these lice had lost their last home when Martha died in 1914, they were called Columbicola extinctus. But guess who else suffers from Malcomson's very same bird louse? Yes! Band-tails do.

It so happens that I had a band-tailed pigeon once, long ago. I found him on a lawn under some trees, too young to fly. I had no idea what to do to help him except take him home and feed him and name him Bertrand Russell.

(I now know that the best thing I could have done was to put him back up in the trees, even if I had to tie a shoebox to a branch for him to squat in, and then leave him alone. That way he would be out of the reach of ground predators, like dogs and cats. His parents would have come and fed him and said encouraging things to him as soon as I left. I wish I had known to do that. I still feel okay about naming him.)

I took good care of Bertrand Russell. He was old enough to know that he was a pigeon and I was not. Though he accepted food from my hand, he didn't like being around humans and that included me. He resented the whole deal. He perched on a high shelf on top of Walker's Mammals of the World (the binding still shows the traces) and thought bitter thoughts.

 

I raised Bertrand Russell until he was feathered out and could fly. I released him in good band-tailed pigeon habitat, a forested area where birders regularly saw band-tails, but it was an abrupt transition for him, what they call a “hard release.” I still feel bad that it was the best I could do.

In 1834, the traveller Thomas L. McKenney was crossing Lake Superior in a storm when a desperate storm-tossed passenger pigeon landed on his boat. He prevented the boatmen from killing it, fed it water and crackers, put it in a mocock (a birchbark basket), and took it home. “[T]hough only a pigeon, it came to me in distress, and if it be its pleasure, we will never part.” He named it Me-me. “It knows its name, and will come when called.” Boy, that doesn't sound like Bertrand.

I never saw bird lice on Bertrand Russell, missing a chance to meet a species back from extinction. But I saw Bertrand himself, a grim bird intent on survival, even if he had to put up with the attentions of a teenaged human. It's the closest I'll ever get to a passenger pigeon, and in retrospect, I'm thrilled about it.

Tiny tar pits for the home

Glue traps are nasty. Animals caught in them die slow horrible deaths. Some people don't mind that for the mice and rats they intend to trap, but are upset when some other creature falls victim.

 At a wildlife rescue center, someone recently brought in a glue trap with a mockingbird hopelessly plastered to it. The bird had been bounding along on mockingbird business when it hopped onto the trap and got its feet stuck. It struggled to get free, striking down with its wings, getting its wings trapped, hitting the trap with its bill, getting its bill stuck, and so forth until it couldn't move at all. It was immobile, terrified.

The person who set the trap found it while the bird was still alive, and rushed it to the rescue centre, swearing they'd never put a glue trap out again.

 What you do in such a case may or may not start with cutting away with the base of the trap. You may sprinkle open areas of glue with sand or some kind of powder, so if you free part of the bird it won't instantly get stuck again, and so your hand or glove won't get stuck. Then you apply an oil like canola oil, to dilute and loosen the intensely sticky “glue.” (Some people use powder for this step too.)

 Now the bird isn't gluey, but it's seriously oily. Still terrified but maybe also starting to feel peeved. It wants to leave.

 Then you have to wash the oil off the angry bird. (Warm water with 1-2% dishwashing liquid.)

 Then you have to rinse the soapy water off the furious bird.

 Then you have to dry the enraged bird, probably with a heat lamp.

 The process is so traumatic that you don't do it all at once, since the bird probably wouldn't survive the shock and horror. It may also have torn feathers out when struggling in the glue.

After the mockingbird had been through all this, was unglued, clean and dry, it had a day or two in a warm dim quiet place (with food and water) so its condition could stabilize, and was transferred to another wildlife rescue center with better facilities for small perching birds.  

When the bird had recovered from its ordeal and had preened its plumage back into passable condition, it was set free.

 

I looked on YouTube for videos showing animals being freed from glue traps and cleaned. There weren't many, and the best one was too long to put here. (It's an eastern phoebe. Rather than saying the classic “phoe-be!” or even giving an alarm call, it's clacking its bill in a threatening way. 'I'm clean enough! Stand back! Okay, now I'm mad! Watch out!')

 The video search was depressing. It showed that many people think animals getting caught in glue traps is hilarious, and some people think that other people getting stuck in glue traps is incredibly sexy.

 On the other hand, I did find these excellent video clips suggesting that being stuck in glue is funny when it happens to a perpetually unsuccessful yet irrepressible coyote. Who was the one who put the glue there in the first place. (Think about that, setters of glue traps.)

 

 

 

Look behind you

If you're reading this before November 6, 2010, you might want to hurry to Churchill Downs track in Louisville, Kentucky for the chance to be there when the legendary Zenyatta runs her last race in the Breeder's Cup. (Or, yeah, you could watch it on tv.) If you're reading after November 6, scroll down for results.

 Zenyatta's six years old at this writing, a cheerful brown horse with a big following. As a yearling with classy breeding, Zenyatta sold for $60,000. This was kind of cheap, allegedly because she had ringworm. Here she is at auction at Keeneland in 2005, an experience she seems neither to have detested nor enjoyed.

 

She was bought by Ann and Jerry Moss, Moss being the M in A&M records. She's named after the album Zenyattà Mondatta, by The Police (signed by Jerry Moss). She's trained by John Shirreffs.

 Zenyatta was a tall girl, slow to get her growth, which is why you didn't see her in the Kentucky Derby or the other Triple Crown races (only for 3-year-olds, and too early in the year for gangly Zenyatta).

Photo: Banamine/James Wood, courtesy of Caroline Betts's Photos. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike. http://www.flickr.com/photos/banamine/5014511275/in/photostream

Her first race (“maiden” as they call it in racing) was at Hollywood Park in late November 2007, against other beginners. In the video, the announcer concentrates on the front runners, barely mentioning Zenyatta as she trails far behind. Suddenly he notes that “Zenyatta is closing nicely” as she comes up on the outside. He reverts to the horses in the lead, but “Carmel Coffee has the lead, but you better take a look at Zenyatta to run by!” Which she does. And wins by three and half lengths. (A “length” is about the length of a horse's body – 8 feet.)

 

In her second race, also at Hollywood Park, they knew Zenyatta was promising, but they didn't understand her yet. “Zenyatta broke very slowly,” the announcer says critically. “A bad start has Zenyatta at the back of the pack,” he says a moment later. The horses at the front battle to overtake each other. Late in the race, “Here comes Zenyatta.” As she pulls ahead to win by three lengths, he exclaims, “Zenyatta is making a mockery of this field!”

 

Her third race was in the El Encino Stakes, and again we hear that she's “a little slow to get going.” We hear about the horses in front with occasional mention of how far back Zenyatta is. Finally the announcer gets excited. “Now Zenyatta's lengthening her stride! ...Zenyatta's – just an amazing coverage of ground, she just covers so much ground with her bounding stride!” She wins.

 

Fourth race, the first at the grade 1 stakes level, and by now the announcers should know that late in the race they're going to be gasping, “Here comes Zenyatta!” Why not script a new line?

You can find more races on YouTube. In the 2008 Lady's Secret Stakes, for example, another filly, Model, tries a similar late-run come-from-behind strategy, but Zenyatta comes from even further behind, even later, and wipes her off the map.

 She runs against fillies, she runs against colts, she carries heavy weights, and she saves her rush for the very end, coming from second to last, last, and “dead last” to leave the others in her dust. It's a great plot – I never get tired of it – and she loves it too. She's undefeated, having won 19 out of 19 races.

By now the announcers are coming up with new lines. “Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's ZENYATTA!” says the announcer for the 2010 Apple Blossom Handicap.

People love her because she wins, because of the way she wins, and because she visibly delights in her work. (I myself would enjoy athletics more if I always won.) In the paddock before the race, Zenyatta prances, raising her forelegs high and pawing the earth. YouTube also has many clips attempting to set her “dancing” to music (without complete success). Here's a non-musical example:

 

In 2009 Zenyatta ran in the Breeder's Cup Classic, a race my sister, trying to get the significance of the thing through my head, emphatically describes as the “pinnacle zenith of the whole deal.” It's open to horses of all ages. Really really good horses of all ages. Naturally, Zenyatta ran “dead last” much of the way, leaving so much distance to make up that the announcer said, “If she wins this, she'll be a superhorse!” She won it. 

She was supposed to retire in 2009, but to wide rejoicing,  was raced again in 2010. Her final race is scheduled to be the November 6 Breeder's Cup Classic, that old thing again, for a purse of $5 million. Will she win? Maybe, maybe not. It's a horse race. 

 

When it's over, she'll retire. To spend more time with her  family. 

 

**

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I'm sad to say that Zenyatta didn't win her last race. She came within a nose.

 Her jockey, who blames himself, was even sadder, weeping and saying the loss was his fault. “She should have won and it hurts,” he said. “She ranks up there with the greatest of all time.”

 Zenyatta is used to running on artificial surfaces, and was perhaps surprised to have a lot of dirt kicked up in her face. She persevered and did her famous surge at the end, coming from way farther back than usual. The announcer sounds as if he thought she was winning it. Here's the last 20 seconds of the race.

   

 

“She ran a hell of a race, second by a nose, she was just flying, just flying,” says my sister. “She ran a totally remarkable race.” I asked if Zenyatta knew she lost. “She pricked her ears after she crossed the finish line like she thought she'd won. I can imagine she thought she'd won.”

 I hope she did.

Old, deaf, busy, important

Tag the Destroyer has a new bad habit. He goes to the side yard and barks. Bark bark bark bark. Pause. Bark bark bark bark. Pause. Bark bark bark bark. It's a strange pattern. He ignores our cries of rage and despair.

 Tag's getting deaf. He no longer barks at the loathsome package delivery trucks, or at dogs who insult us by being walked past our house, or the serial killers who carry the mail, because he doesn't hear these outrages taking place. But I think his conscience nags at him – I haven't barked at anything in days! – and he resolves to be vigilant. He'll go out in the yard and lurk near the street where he might detect a disturbance.

 Even if he doesn't, he sounds off. Bark bark bark bark! Pause. Bark bark bark bark you get the idea. Luckily, his conscience usually only nags at him on warm afternoons. He doesn't hear if we call his name or yell “Shut UP!” He can sort of hear it if we clap our hands, and he'll fall quiet and try to figure out if that was real or not. For a moment.

 

This reminds me of Clea, a dog I once knew.

 Clea was a large dog. When I met her she was antique, and had gone very white, and very deaf. I think she was the elegant ruins of a German shorthaired pointer. She belonged to my father's second wife, Vera (a renowned mountain climber).

Clea seemed somewhat feral, grabby, greedy, not eager to please. But Vera said that Clea had once been a beautifully trained dog. In those days, dainty and precise, she had had exquisite company manners. She knew and heeded common commands, like sit and stay, and also knew and performed fancy tricks, like barking four times when you asked “Clea, what's two plus two?”

  What had happened? Apparently, as Clea went deaf, she decided that if she didn't hear you tell her to do something or not do something, she didn't have to obey. Even if she knew what you wanted. You didn't want me to grab the bread off the table? You should have said something. You did? Well, I didn't hear you.

 Loophole!

Clea wasn't conscienceless. She still considered herself bound to protect the home from intruders. Due to her  deafness, she never detected any intruders. But periodically she would stand on the top deck and bark threateningly, so intruders would know she was on duty. The house was on a hillside, and the deck projected out impressively, so intruders over a great area would hear Clea's fierce warning.

 Alas, the idea that possible intruders should be menaced usually occurred to Clea around three or four in the morning.

 Clea would utter a series of barks, and then pause, listening in case anyone dared to bark back. No, apparently they didn't. Excellent! She would bark some more, pause, bark some more.

 This was interspersed with Vera calling, “Clea! Clea! Be quiet! Clea! Come in! Clea!” Which Clea didn't hear. Finally Vera would fling on a robe and rush out on the deck to drag Clea indoors, still barking defiantly into the night.

 (Why not close the door onto the deck? Um, Clea had other problems sometimes found in old dogs, and night-time deck access protected the rugs and floors.)

 

So Tag's strange barking pattern is familiar. If his hearing worsens, we could get him a vibrating collar – no, not a shock collar, a vibrating collar – such as people use with dogs who were born deaf. When yelling doesn't work, you can catch the dog's attention by spooky action at a distance.

 Tag's a good-hearted dog and doesn't use his poor hearing as a loophole. Barking in the side yard is a mild inconvenience. And it's a reminder of how feeble his hearing is getting, and what that's like for him.

 Gradual hearing loss can feel as if people are paying less and less attention to you. We still speak to Tag all the time. “Who's a good dog?” we ask. “Who's the foulest, stinkiest dog in the whole world?” “Who's been eating grass and puking on the rug?”

 But if Tag doesn't hear it, he doesn't know it, and it seems as if we've stopped talking to him. We seem less interested. Life gets lonelier. We have to remember to get his attention, rub his belly, pat him, scratch his forehead between the eyes, hug him, wrestle with him. That's what the strange barking signals. Not intruders, but the intrusion of time.

Nasty neighbors

Last week's post was of swans, mayhem, and the devotion of a husband and father.

Afterward my attention was drawn to a recent incident in Britain, in which authorities felt compelled to relocate a family of swans. The father of the family, Hissing Sid, had maintained a desirable territory on the River Chelmer, Essex, for perhaps 25 years, growing “increasingly crabby.”


Sid, aka Horace, appears to have begun a vendetta against the Chelmsford Canoe Club, attacking canoes almost daily. His technique: knock oars out of people's hands, and then go after the canoeists themselves. They say he tries to peck holes in boats.

Finally he made the very bad choice of knocking a 13-year-old girl out of her canoe and then attempting to drown her.

Naturally, the worried people turned to the Queen – okay, to the Queen's Swan Marker, whatever – and got permission to relocate Sid, his wife Nancy, and their six  home-schooled children. (English mute swans, if wild, belong to the reigning monarch. Because they do.)

A remote body of water with no canoes was located forty miles away in Sussex. This was the idea of the canoe club secretary, who said that she “thought of Lafarge, a quarrying firm, who are always digging large holes and filling them with water, so I gave them a call and they were able to help.”

Once the cygnets were deemed old enough to bear up, the entire family was captured, bagged, and taken to Sussex. They were reported to be “gliding serenely” around Gallows Hill quarry, which is closed to the public.

Perhaps they were less serene than they seemed. Violence is not the only tool at a swan's command. Instead of attacking Lafarge's estates manager, overpowering him, and forcing him to drive them back to Essex, the swans simply flew home, appearing on the Chelmer to the dismay of canoeists and the delight of swan viewers.

Or so we were told by the Daily Mail (whose website has some really obnoxious ads). “Asbo swan makes 40-mile journey back to his old stomping ground,” they proclaimed.

“Asbo” is short for Anti-Social Behaviour Order. That's an order under which a troublesome person is kept out of certain areas, or forbidden to do certain things. (Not the  Queen's idea, Tony Blair's idea.) Apparently anti-social behavior can include such things as public drunkenness, vandalism, a type of breakdancing called windmilling, spitting, and of course, attacking canoes.

But according to more recent reports, the swan family now cruising up and down the beautiful Chelmer River, accumulating grievances, is not Sid, Nancy, and their sprogs. It is a completely different swan family, with one more cygnet. “This is a nice, friendly family,” said the canoe club secretary.


Let's hope they stay friendly. Why not give them free canoe lessons as a gesture of welcome? And let's hope Sid and Nancy continue to enjoy the privacy of their quarry.



The tale of Sid and Nancy was brought to my attention by Daffodil Planter, who has a splendid gardening blog. Sometimes Daffodil Planter's gardening interests and my animal interests intersect, as in her post about the Next Big Thing: Backyard Turkeys. Of course, turkeys seldom have to deal with canoes.