{"id":267,"date":"2011-08-11T07:01:30","date_gmt":"2011-08-11T15:01:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/garden\/?p=267"},"modified":"2015-11-24T07:32:34","modified_gmt":"2015-11-24T15:32:34","slug":"where-the-buffalo-roam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/where-the-buffalo-roam\/","title":{"rendered":"Where the Buffalo Roam"},"content":{"rendered":"

WHERE THE BUFFALO ROAM
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\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A few years ago I was a smug gardener, secure in the knowledge that the worst wildlife problem in my garden was the groundhog.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 In my yard he ate mostly self-sown buttercups with only occasional forays into the expensive ornamentals.\u00a0 The day he chomped down an unusual campanula, I dumped two loads of used cat litter down his hole, just to send a message.\u00a0 He stayed away for about a week and then resumed his buttercup binge.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I should have known how much Mother Nature dislikes smugness.\u00a0 This year my neighborhood has hosted an explosion of wildlife.\u00a0 Since the beginning of the growing season, we have had wild turkeys, possums, raccoons, skunks, deer, and even a coyote sighting.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 We also have hawks aplenty in the air, not to mention buzzards.\u00a0 Curiously, the groundhog population seems somewhat diminished.\u00a0 I suspect that either the neighborhood has gotten too crowded or the hawks have gotten too hungry.\u00a0 The semi-mythical coyote may have played a role as well.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0 They paraded across lawns, paused to rest in and dine on various gardens and generally made a spectacle of themselves.\u00a0 People slowed their cars to watch.\u00a0 The tom was especially large and handsome and by all appearances, he was well aware of that fact.\u00a0 After a day of exciting everyone within a four block area, the turkeys moved on.\u00a0 We heard that they made numerous appearances in other parts of town, but recently they seem to have vanished.\u00a0 Maybe they heard that if they stayed here too long they would start receiving property tax bills.\u00a0 The turkeys’ disappearance is still under investigation.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Since dahlias are tender in our climate, I grow mine in pots on the back porch.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 He makes no attempt to eat them and has no interest in the numerous other plants nearby.\u00a0 We don’t keep trash or recycling there, so there is no enticing food or food odor–only vulnerable dahlias.\u00a0 At first I tried benign deterrence, strewing freshly cut catmint over the soil of the dahlia pots.\u00a0 This worked for three nights.\u00a0 On the morning after the fourth night, I found the tubers once again strewn across the porch.\u00a0 Now the pots sit on a high table, out of the raccoon’s reach.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 By fall I hope that the dahlias will be in bloom and the raccoon will have figured out how to have fun elsewhere.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Possums and skunks aren’t so bad.\u00a0 They do their frolicking at night and don’t mess with the plants.\u00a0 The deer, however, have gotten everyone in a frenzy.\u00a0 Roving deer are not new to our town, but they are a novelty in our neighborhood.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Now we seem to have at least four young males and a couple of does.\u00a0 I scared them off my front lawn just last week when I found them gazing speculatively at a peegee hydrangea.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 They are right to feel safe.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 My neighbors, with landscaping and Lyme disease on their minds, have called the police and asked for help with the deer.\u00a0 After all, the herd seems happy here, the males are getting bigger and we all know what happens to male deer in the spring.\u00a0 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.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The police say there is nothing to be done about the deer.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The deer may have pea-size brains, but they are no fools and have made themselves scarce this past week.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 In the meantime, my neighbors are stocking up on homemade deer deterrents and varmint repellent sprays.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WHERE THE BUFFALO ROAM \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A few years ago I was a smug gardener, secure in the knowledge that the worst wildlife problem in my garden was the groundhog.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-interest","category-summer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=267"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1524,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267\/revisions\/1524"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}