WHERE THE BUFFALO ROAM
A few years ago I was a smug gardener, secure in the knowledge that the worst wildlife problem in my garden was the groundhog. Granted, he was as large as a beach ball, perpetually hungry and capable of digging underground routes reminiscent of the Lincoln Tunnel; but he was manageable. In my yard he ate mostly self-sown buttercups with only occasional forays into the expensive ornamentals. The day he chomped down an unusual campanula, I dumped two loads of used cat litter down his hole, just to send a message. He stayed away for about a week and then resumed his buttercup binge.
I should have known how much Mother Nature dislikes smugness. This year my neighborhood has hosted an explosion of wildlife. Since the beginning of the growing season, we have had wild turkeys, possums, raccoons, skunks, deer, and even a coyote sighting. The latter is not a certainty, but given the invasion by the rest of the wild kingdom, I can’t imagine why the coyotes would allow themselves to be left behind. We also have hawks aplenty in the air, not to mention buzzards. Curiously, the groundhog population seems somewhat diminished. I suspect that either the neighborhood has gotten too crowded or the hawks have gotten too hungry. The semi-mythical coyote may have played a role as well.
The turkeys created the season’s first photo-ops, with a flock of eight hens and one enormous tom strutting around the neighbors’ lawns like New Yorkers evaluating suburban housing stock. They paraded across lawns, paused to rest in and dine on various gardens and generally made a spectacle of themselves. People slowed their cars to watch. The tom was especially large and handsome and by all appearances, he was well aware of that fact. After a day of exciting everyone within a four block area, the turkeys moved on. We heard that they made numerous appearances in other parts of town, but recently they seem to have vanished. Maybe they heard that if they stayed here too long they would start receiving property tax bills. The turkeys’ disappearance is still under investigation.
Raccoons have been rolling our garbage cans since the advent of regular trash pick-up, but this year, one of the resident raccoons developed a fondness for dahlias. Since dahlias are tender in our climate, I grow mine in pots on the back porch. The raccoon in question makes a regular habit of climbing up the flight of stairs to the back porch, digging up the tubers and tossing them around. He makes no attempt to eat them and has no interest in the numerous other plants nearby. We don’t keep trash or recycling there, so there is no enticing food or food odor–only vulnerable dahlias. At first I tried benign deterrence, strewing freshly cut catmint over the soil of the dahlia pots. This worked for three nights. On the morning after the fourth night, I found the tubers once again strewn across the porch. Now the pots sit on a high table, out of the raccoon’s reach. The tubers are sprouting nicely and even though they would get better sunlight in their original location, all the light in the world could not compensate for the not-so-tender ministrations of the raccoon. By fall I hope that the dahlias will be in bloom and the raccoon will have figured out how to have fun elsewhere.
Possums and skunks aren’t so bad. They do their frolicking at night and don’t mess with the plants. The deer, however, have gotten everyone in a frenzy. Roving deer are not new to our town, but they are a novelty in our neighborhood. Starting about six weeks ago, we began seeing several adolescent males and one lonely young doe grazing in the nearby park and on our front lawns. Now we seem to have at least four young males and a couple of does. I scared them off my front lawn just last week when I found them gazing speculatively at a peegee hydrangea. It takes a fair amount of arm waving and shouting to scare them, because they seem to be very comfortable with the fact that suburban humans are prone to all kinds of dramatic body gyrations and raucous vocalizations. Ultimately the deer know that the vast majority of us are unarmed and our offspring, if they eat meat at all, consume only boneless chicken. They are right to feel safe.
My neighbors, with landscaping and Lyme disease on their minds, have called the police and asked for help with the deer. After all, the herd seems happy here, the males are getting bigger and we all know what happens to male deer in the spring. Nobody wants to wait and risk having an antler-crashing deer smack-down in the front yard just as the daffodils are bursting into bloom.
The police say there is nothing to be done about the deer. However, they have also stepped up neighborhood patrols, if only to eliminate the mini-traffic jams that ensue when commuters slow down to admire the bucolic scene. The deer may have pea-size brains, but they are no fools and have made themselves scarce this past week. Some people think they have gone the way of the wild turkeys, but I know they are just lurking in the shadows, waiting until the police have business elsewhere. In the meantime, my neighbors are stocking up on homemade deer deterrents and varmint repellent sprays. Our roses and hostas now smell like scented soap, pepper spray and/or the urine of creatures we have never even seen, but we rest more peacefully–at least until the bears arrive.