#103 Animal Rights

Animal Rights.

Some years the wildlife is more prolific than others. Acorns are often the reason given for the abundance of squirrels or chipmunks. The year the oaks rain down their heavy seed pods the survival rate of these pests or adorable critters (choose your own description) goes way up. When abundant supplies of nature’s bounty fails there is much starvation going on in those nearby woods and fields. And in your backyard. 

I attend a lot of wildlife programs at the local public library, or did when they could be held in the Community Room which was often chock full of little kids and snow white heads with every age in between. The love of nature and critters is a very level playing field which pays no attention to age. The format of these programs is usually a lecture followed by lively questions and answers and, the most important part, visiting animal “ambassadors”, birds or other rescued critters who for one reason or another can’t be returned back into the wild. It’s the proximity, the up-close-and-personal chance to look into the eyes of a raptor or what turns out to be the most adorable face of an opossum named Ophelia, that gets us up and out of our chairs on an early snowy evening in February to be in close to fur or feathers. 

This year there is an over abundance of chippies. They are scurrying everywhere. If nature sticks to the plan this probably means well fed (and higher survival rates) for foxes and coyotes as well for as owls and hawks. But chipmunks can do a lot of damage to gardens and houses. So too can the mice that thrive on the leftovers from bird feeders. A love of feathered things brings along the risks of mouse invasions (or worse, rat infestations) and subsequent chain predators such as bears or bobcats. The balance in wildlife populations is constantly shifting. 

This summer there are also battlegrounds in many backyard in the form of wars on woodchucks, those possessors of voracious appetites of entitlement as they turn toward gardens made with love and lots of hard work in hopes of tasty backyard fruits and veggies. For you, not for them. In this year of generalized and specific awfuls many backyard gardens became beacons of hope and solace. Just as old and new gardeners were beginning to reap bountiful rewards those miserable terrors moved in overnight and destroyed everything. It is astounding how much destruction can be wrought in so little time by such small fur-balls. And don’t get me started on the continual warfare with deer. They are taller with even bigger stomachs. No compromise is possible. The energy and costs to reap the rewards of backyard gardening was described in a book published a number of years ago entitled “The $40 Tomato”. The ouch factor made it hard to chuckle the first time I read that title as it came a little too close to my own efforts at growing backyard yummies.

People who have never tasted freshly picked, out-of-the-ground vegetables can more easily defend wildlife. It is quite possible they have not needed to grow their own food out of economic necessity and, if the food chain supply line holds, they may get to keep their concept of loving nature through rose-colored spectacles. Those of us who have lost our well intended, possibly critically needed, homegrown foods to the digestive cravings of our four legged neighbors have quite a different viewpoint. But the rhythms of abundance and scarcity apply also to human beings, something we humans seemed to have forgotten even though our pendulum may have begun moving in a difficult direction and then we may be sharply reminded that human history is fraught with just such struggles even for us. 

Note: This caterpillar gets to remain munching my parsley, one of its favorite foods, as I believe it will become an Eastern Black Swallowtail Butterfly and there are never enough of those.