Unplanned Urban Wildlife Habitat

She was a real beauty and appeared to be lost standing in my driveway, looking at me with those big brown eyes. I wondered if she needed directions, but before I could inquire, she scampered into the neighbor’s yard and—with a backward glance—disappeared into a small woodlot.

I have seen white-tailed deer in my yard before, but not very often and usually late at night. Even

though there are wooded areas nearby, my suburban neighborhood is dominated by a golf course and jam-packed with houses—most with fenced yards and many with swimming pools. It is not exactly ideal wildlife habitat but the number of wild animals that share my little corner of the world is rather astonishing.

I suppose most of the animals I see are just passing through, like the box turtles I have been seeing recently. Last week I had to stop my car while a lady, whose own car was parked in the middle of the road, tried to coax a turtle up and over the curb—without touching it. She carefully balanced the turtle on the end of her shoe and tried to scoot it up into the grass, but it kept slipping off of her foot. I was reaching for my door handle to go help her when another person got out of his car and came to the rescue. As the line of cars in both directions drove away, I wondered if the turtle would continue his slow march to safety or whether he might turn around and drop right back into the roadway.

I got a firsthand look at the problem the very next day when on my morning walk, I found another box turtle with his nose pressed against the curb and his front feet clawing at the concrete wall trying desperately to climb into someone’s lawn. It wasn’t going to happen, so I carried him to a nearby planted area and pointed him in the direction of the golf course. It wasn’t ideal, but at least he would have a chance—unlike the turtle that fell into my swimming pool a few days later. I had to scoop him out with the net.

And speaking of the swimming pool, what an animal trap that has turned out to be. The squirrels have figured out how to dangle from the edge by their hind legs and get a cool drink of water. Other critters like frogs, turtles, lizards, and a few snakes aren’t as adaptable. Once they fall in, they are not clever enough to find the ladder or the steps, even if that is how they entered in the first place.

A few weeks ago I heard a frantic call from my wife, who had been out for her afternoon swim. I rushed out and discovered that a baby armadillo had been on the bottom step of the ladder getting a drink and lost his balance. As humorous as it was to see an armadillo bobbing around in our swimming pool (they are excellent swimmers, that is how they have expanded their range so quickly), my wife grabbed the net and deposited him in the bushes with his buddies and they went scampering off.

For the most part, I enjoy sharing my yard with the local wildlife But every once in a while my patience is tested—like when the peaches disappeared off of our tree. Last week, our small tree was so laden with a dozen or so peaches that I had to place some boards under the branches to prop them up. They were beautiful—fuzzy, reddish orange, and plump. They were a little on the hard side so we were waiting for them to ripen. But we waited too long. A few days ago, they disappeared—every last one of them.

“It was the deer,” my wife said. Her evidence was the nibbled leaves on the branches that had once held the fruit—branches that were much too high off the ground to have been eaten by a rabbit. But what had the deer done with the peaches? Had she single-handedly eaten a dozen peaches, pits and all?

I don’t know what happened to the peaches, but everyone who knows my wife knows how seriously she takes her garden. If that deer knows what’s good for her, she will steer clear of my yard for a while. There’s a big, deep pond in my back yard and if she falls in I might not be able to save her.

As natural as life

Much of society, it seems, is disconnected from the source of our food. Deep down we know that if we eat meat, some animal had to provide that meat—but it is not something to be talked about in polite society.

This was illustrated recently when my wife, an elementary school librarian, was speaking to a first-grade class after reading a story about what animals eat. She explained the differences between carnivores, herbivores, and omnivores but when asked what category humans fall into, the students became confused.

Many did not realize that humans eat other animals—that when eating hamburger they are eating a cow or when consuming bacon they are eating a pig. This urban generation is being raised on shrink-wrapped food from the grocery store. I wondered if some parents might be upset that their children were being told otherwise.

Why the disconnect? Perhaps it is because we don’t want to think about the fact that animals are killed to supply our meat. We are content with the illusion.

This reminds me of the story (probably untrue, but a good story none-the-less) about a display presented by showman P. T. Barnum early in his career. It was called The Happy Family and it is said to have featured a lion, a tiger, a panther, and a lamb—all in the same cage. After the exhibition had been running for a while, a friend asked the showman how everything was going. “Oh, fairly well,” Barnum replied. “I’m going to make a permanent feature out of it, if the supply of lambs holds out.”

The guests I meet on my wagon are, for the most part, enthusiastic sportsmen. They love shooting the way some people love golf, even to the point of cheering the well places shot. Most of them are more like me than I ever suspected.

They are naturalists at heart. They may fly-in on private jets and carry shotguns that cost more than a new car, but they still marvel at the vultures that soar overhead, ask about the prescribed fire that maintains quail habitat, and get excited when a cooper’s hawk swoops in to steal one of their birds.

They are as knowledgeable about what quail eat as they are what size shotgun shell will bring them down and they believe in giving the birds a sporting chance to get away. Most will not shoot unless their target is well into the air and flapping madly in the opposite direction.

I am not a hunter. It’s not that I disapprove; it’s just that shooting guns and killing animals is not my thing. I have, however, seen lions in Africa kill an antelope. It is a different experience in person than it is on television. It is more visceral, more intense, and it helped me realize that it is perfectly natural for one animal to die in order to feed another.

It is more than a little ironic that in my retirement after a career working in zoos, where our goal was to extend the lives of animals, I find myself part of an operation that harvests (a polite euphemism for kills) hundreds of quail every month. My justification—if any is needed—is that death is as natural life itself.

The birds that are killed in our operation are dropped in a box on the wagon and placed on ice after each hunt. They are then cleaned, packaged, and frozen—ready for consumption by our guests. They are harvested at least as humanely as the billions of chickens who are slaughtered every year to provide our chicken nuggets, wings, and fingers.

Author, Temple Grandin, uses her autism and her expertise as an animal science professor at Colorado State University as a platform to advocate for the humane treatment of the livestock we slaughter for food. In her 2009 book Animals Make Us human, she suggests that our relationship with the animals we use for food should be mutually beneficial. If we are going to take animals for food, then we should provide those animals a good quality of life prior to that use.

I often wonder as I sit on my wagon and watch the hunters stalk the broomsedge and wiregrass hoping to flush another covey what this landscape would look like without quail hunters paying for its preservation. My guess is that the wide open, pine-wiregrass habitat would be swallowed up in a scrub oak forest. The quail, gopher tortoise, and other savanna-loving creatures would disappear.

Perhaps the people who oppose hunting as cruel and barbaric might see the end of hunting as a victory but, from where I sit on the wagon, it would be a hollow victory indeed.