Last Night’s Paddle

I paddled out onto the dark, swollen river last night, its face flat and thick like glass, lit by a halo of candlelight hung from the stern, slid upstream to cricket chorus and underbrush rustle, past sunken beach and bridge, further on into stillness and quiet, until a tangle of trees in a bend drew back to reveal the moon, hung low in the sky, surprised and astounded, flooding its light, bright and black, on everything.

Today in Animal News

I got up this morning to see if the the somewhat-beyond-the-pale chicken I left out in the backyard last night for the raccoons was gone. I made a bet with Susan that it would be and I’d find the bones down by the river. I checked the little tub I had left said chicken in. It was clean as as whistle. I headed down to the river to look for the bones. No dice there, though I did find an old corn cob that got thrown out back the night before. I guess that makes it a draw.

Just then I noticed that fish were jumping so I ran up and grabbed the pole. First cast I had one on the line. I couldn’t believe I’d finally caught a fish here! OK, it was only six inches long, so I let him go, but still.

After a few more less successful casts I headed back up to the outdoor shower to get going on my day. As I lathered up—oddly the neighboring cat, watching from the deck next door, found this very interesting—I noticed that all of the birds were gone from the nest. Just like that, they were all grown up.

It also occurred to me that the birds’ evolutionary timing was spot on. Having your chicks ready to leave the nest right as a huge blackberry crop comes in makes perfect sense. Well done, finches, or whatever you are.

Then I finished my shower and realized that, what with all the excitement, I’d forgotten to grab a towel. So I trod gingerly, naked and wet into the storage room to grab a couple of clean shop rags, dried myself off, happy at the thought of another beautiful morning.

Growing Up Fast

The first bird is out of the nest as mama (or papa?) stands by.

Wow, baby birds grow up fast. It seems like just last week they were scrawny little fluff balls with beaks and now the first bird is out of the nest. Oh, wait, it was last week. It’s really amazing the change. Both mama and papa bird are on feeding shifts now and all four chicks are looking well. All they do is eat and twitter—in the original sense.

Birds of a Feather

Bird feeding time. Mama bird is the blurry thing in front of the nest.

The birds under the house have had chicks. There are four them. They’re all just fuzz and mouth. Mama bird seems to spend all day flying back and forth feeding them. For the chicks it’s like having a non-stop take out delivery service. Instead of Pizza Hut though, it’s Cricket Hut, or whatever baby birds eat.

Every time mama flies in with another wriggling tidbit they all chirp desperately. She only feeds one or two of them at a time and it seems like the same one or two. I wonder if they’ll all make it.

New Dock!

My new dock! If you look closely you can see the TV in the river. Next time whoever lost it will have to make sure they attach it to their boat more securely.

Check it out—I built a dock! Nat came by and helped me launch it. I only fell in the river a couple times chasing down the pieces that tried to float away. Stella, N & B’s dog, helped by testing the end of the dock to make sure it could support her as she stared intently at the ducks, while making noises of frustration, stemming from the fact that the ducks were SO CLOSE but yet she didn’t want to jump in after them. The dock passed that test. The ducks, for their part, were very interested in the granola bars Nat and I were eating but of course were less interested in Stella. The twain never met.

Anyway, it was fun to build and I’m looking forward to parking the canoe down there.

People Drivin’ All Kinds of Crazy

Coming home after Maker Faire the other night on the Boho Hwy, I saw some flares and slowed down. Coming through the turn the road was blocked by a firetruck. Behind it a pick-up truck with a partly crushed roof lay upside down, sprawled across both lanes among the glitter of broken glass, its headlights still on. I asked the fireman if everyone lived. He said he didn’t know. It was some teenage kid.

I see a lot more accidents here than I did in the city. A few weeks ago I was driving home late and watched a guy a couple of hundred yards down the road make what I thought was a really fast left turn. Then I saw his car slam into the ditch and complete the last half of a 180 in a headlight-lit cloud of dust.

I rushed to the scene, parked, ran up to the car, and asked the guy if he was OK. He gathered himself together (not literally, thank god) and said he was fine. Both his air bags had gone off. I asked him what happened. He said  he’d just gotten off of work and was heading home to Santa Rosa and that he wasn’t sure what had happened. When he was out of the car, I asked if he’d been drinking and he said no. He didn’t seem out of it, so I offered to pull him out. (I have an emergency kit with a tow strap in the car.) I looked at his car. His right rear tire was embedded in the side of the ditch and coolant poured out of his radiator. I hooked him up, put the Montero in four-wheel-low and pulled him out. I unhooked him, moved my car out of the middle of the road, and went back to tell him about his radiator, but he was gone, which was kind of weird. I shrugged and drove off and then saw him coming towards me. He’d driven down the road, turned around and was approaching in the other lane at a pretty good clip. I saw where he’d turned around given that his trail had been marked with a stream of coolant. He blew past me. It was then I thought maybe I should have left him in the ditch. I also saw his tire marks from earlier. It looked as if he’d taken the turn too wide and his right-side wheels touched the dirt shoulder. If that made him spin out though, he must have been going pretty fast. I didn’t want him to do any worse than he’d already done that night. But then again his car surely overheated before making it to Santa Rosa.

He was the second person I’d pulled out of a ditch in less than a month. Personally, I’ve been driving slower.

More Deer News

Driving north on the Bohemian Highway the other night I spotted a doe and two fawns near Nat’s mom’s place. Maybe that was the little guy that Nat and Brookelynn helped across the fence the other day.

In Other Animal News…

My new downstairs neighbors.

While working under the house the other day—it’s on stilts—I noticed that a couple of birds (finches? swallows?) had started the construction phase of a new mud house. The lot they had chosen, at the intersection of a gas line perch and a floor joist, didn’t seem ideal to me since it was directly above my canoe, which had already begun to accumulate a layer of dirt and poop. I cleaned the canoe and scraped off the house’s foundation in the hopes that maybe they’d move over a joist or two out of canoe range. They didn’t. And what’s more I felt like a bad neighbor. I mean, I’d already run over a deer. Couldn’t I just let these birds have their dream home? The birds, undeterred, began construction anew and finished their home in short order. Now they sit down there and sing. It’s really pretty nice.

Oh Deer…

I ran over a deer last week. When I fitted the huge, steel, ARB bumper to my truck to protect again animal strikes, mowing down little fawns wasn’t exactly what I had in mind. It went down like this: I was heading down the Bohemian Highway into Freestone from Occidental and I saw this deer cross the road maybe 25 yards in front of me. “Oh,” I thought, “a deer.” As I approached the spot where it had been, I looked into the hedge to see if I could tell where it went. I couldn’t. Amazing how they just disappear like that, practically into thin air! The only problem is that they appear out of thin air just as readily. When I turned my eyes back towards the road, there stood the cutest little fawn, with this look on its face like it was still trying to make sense of the world and all of the big, fast-moving objects in it. Oh Jesus! I reacted as quickly as I could, stomping on the brakes only to let them go again. The tires gave a quick chirp just to prove they were game, but it was too late. The spotted fawn had already disappeared under the car by the time my foot hit the pedal.

It was weird–I braced for the thud but there was nothing. I slowed to a stop and looked in the rear view mirror. There was the little fawn standing in the road looking back at me! “Wow!” I thought, “it totally ducked and passed right under the car!” They are so quick, those deer! Hooray for high ground clearance! I felt a wave of relief wash over me, a nice, warm, all’s-well-that-ends-well sense of relief, that is, until I realized it wasn’t me the little fawn was looking at but rather its fallen sibling, laying in the road a few yards away and twitching violently. Ah, crap…

I sat there trying to come up with some options. I should go put it out of its misery. But how? Slice its throat? A grisly option, and do I even have a knife? How would I approach it? Would it scream? Can dear scream? The whole time it lay on its side jerking horribly, while its sibling looked on unsure. Terrible… It shook a few more seconds and then it stopped. That was it. It just stopped and lay there dead.

On minute it was looking at me and the next minute it was gone. I told Brookelynn about it. “Nat and I came across a doe and two fawns on Bohemian Highway last weekend,” she said.

“Where?” I asked.

“Between Monte Rio and Occidental, before you get to Nat’s mom’s.”

“Oh…”

As she tells it, the fawn they saw was having trouble getting over a fence that a doe and one other fawn had just crossed, so they stopped to try to help it out. I originally thought they actually picked it up but deer usually have ticks so they tried to chase it over the fence. “Eventually we frightened it enough in the right direction and it made it across. I wonder if you killed the one we helped on Saturday,” she joked.

Bummer. Get helped out on Saturday, get run over on Tuesday. We talked about it again the other night and Seth added some perspective. “At the beginning of the season, I always see a doe come through the backyard with two fawns. By the end of the season, I see it with one fawn. That’s always how it is.”

Maybe I was just playing the roll of semi-natural selector then? After all of this talk of hunting it felt weird to kill an animal by accident, especially such a young one. OK, if it hadn’t been me, maybe some other animal would have gotten it. But then at least it would have been a meal. Well, I’m sure still will be. The turkey vultures and raccoons will fight over it.

Poor little guy. I actually went home and said a little apology prayer to it. The next time I see a deer cross the road in spring time, I’ll watch out for tag-alongs.

Although, where was mama deer during all of this? That’s the most laissez-faire parenting I’ve ever seen. “Mom, Timmy just got runned over!”"

“Just leave him. We’ve got to get to the stream. Come on! We haven’t got all day!” or so she seemed to say (by her absense)…

Fish Buffet

I went fishing recently with a couple of friends. Maybe the hooks were too large–I’m not sure. All I know is that we went through a whole tub of worms and the fish nibbled every last one of the hooks. After a while they stopped biting, as if to say, “No thanks–they were just delicious but, really, we couldn’t eat another bite.”

That’s us, providing fish with the finest hand-delivered, buffet dining. I’m sure we’re being written up in some underwater restaurant review right now. “Unrelenting service! Four-star worms! A fantastic experience…”