Our home place, perched on a ridge
overlooking the Virgin River and adjacent to Zion Park boundaries, is
sufficiently remote that unexpected human visitors are rare. One of its most
endearing qualities is that the opposite is true of our friends from the animal
kingdom who have enjoyed the right of passage over its 20 extraordinary acres
for untold centuries of earth time and – so far – have shown a generous
willingness to share it with us. Virtually every day we are witnesses to the co-habitational
character of this plot of land we might think of as “ours”.
Early on we were startled to hear
someone “knocking” on the glass door opening onto our south-facing rear deck.
Knock, knock KNOCK! Taking the required moments to get there, lift the sliding
sun-shade and peer out, we would find no-one there. The experience would repeat
itself with confusing frequency. It still happens, but now we smile knowingly
before confronting our “guest”, a roving road
runner who enjoys watching and challenging his reflection in the
double-layer glass. Others of his kind – probably siblings or aunts uncles and
cousins – keep an almost-predictable schedule as they come and go on their
tail-flicking journeys, sometimes stopping to measure the leaping distance
separating them from a humming bird leaving our feeder.
Two days ago a glance out of our
living room window caught the stealthy glimpse of a beautiful gray fox ghosting across our back yard
in a way no other animal quite duplicates. It brought to mind the mental image
of a 70-year-old memory: It was the summer of my first year living in Vermont.
I was approaching a clearing in the deep forest above our farm where a
long-abandoned hilltop farm had been left behind when main roads moved to the
valley floor in the wake of rural-electric power lines. My silent footsteps
revealed an antlered white tail buck
and an adult red fox playing their
own version of tag, taking turns chasing each other in circles; obviously for
the sheer fun of it and with no thought to the normal enmity of their kind.
The
ten acres of irrigated pasture we look down upon each day is a natural
“highway” and gathering place for deer, wild turkeys, Canadian geese, coyotes
and the occasional mountain lion. Black vultures, bald eagles and a host of
hawks and falcons regularly patrol its margins, while seven families of great
blue herons nest high in the nearby cottonwoods, returning each year to raise
their broods in large stick-built nests they are constantly repairing. I was
most impressed several years ago by a visitor whose story I will always remember as that of the three-legged coyote. The lower field is pockmarked by
tunnel-entries of dozens – perhaps even hundreds – of gophers. This particular hunter
was handicapped by a missing front leg, probably the legacy of an encounter
with a steel trap. (Coyotes are not beloved of Utah farmers, ranchers and
teen-agers with a new shiny Ruger 10/22.) This coyote however had a partner to
help with the digging, a mate with four perfectly good legs. (Their relative
size suggested that this companion was the male.) When an inhabited den was detected
by the nose of either, the big male would start digging with his mate waiting
for the right moments to take over, nosing her way through the tunnel and then
pulling the unearthed prey to the surface where they would share the bounty
before moving on. On several occasions I observed the pair at work, sharing a
perfect division of duties and exhibiting a binocular view of the wild kingdom’ s lesson on just how a good
marriage should work.
When we first “zero-scaped” our
front yard we capped off the colored gravel with several large boulders native
to our area, the largest of which looks down on everything around it. Its
dominance does not go unnoticed and at this moment a large green lizard is
claiming ownership. A “squadron” of Gambel’s
quail frequently (and noisily) transits our property across this route –
east to west or return, - their black top-knots waving proudly. Always, one of
the two dozen-or-so will advance ahead of the others to take up sentry duty
atop our boulder, from which prominence it watches for trouble; TO OUR NEVER-ENDING HUMAN DELIGHT.
Caught sampling
shrubbery, two well-fed “visitors” pause 20 feet from our front door.
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