Better Than Bird Watching

Living the Wild Life in Idaho

By Joan Opyr, 2-21-06

Usually when I go back to Raleigh, North Carolina, I see a few deer, a couple of owls, and maybe a hawk or two. My sister's house backs onto Shelley Lake and part of the city's Greenway Trail system. Geese are common; so are ducks. Snakes of all kinds slither up into my sister's backyard, and my brother-in-law (a federal prison guard by profession but a born herpetologist) gathers them up carefully and releases them just beyond the back garden gate. This last visit, two weeks ago, I saw nothing. One hawk, slowly circling above the family cemetery in Zebulon, but that was it for wildlife -- unless you count the exotic boots on the patrons of The Longbranch Saloon.

When I came home to Idaho, I began compiling a list with my spouse of the amazing things we've seen since we moved here for good in 1993. Porcupines, coyotes, deer and elk in abundance. Hawks, many and of a wide variety, from Ferruginous to Red-tailed to a peculiar white morph. I've encountered two bobcats, one in my garage eating the cat's food in 1999, the other only recently, on a late night insomniac drive down to Troy. I've seen a lynx, running up a hillside, black bear at the edge of the forest, and porcupines galore of all ages and sizes. Some look like old men, hobbling across the road, others like young pincushions moving at a more sprightly pace. I've seen one up a sapling, nibbling the bark.

My encounters with wildlife have frequently been astonishing. I stepped out into my backyard one morning to find a spotted fawn playing in the lawn sprinkler, her mother watching nervously from about twenty yards away. The first time I went bird hunting, an enormous hawk dropped down out of nowhere and stole my bird -- just snatched it as it fell and sailed away. Late one foggy night, I saw what looked like a three or four-year old child standing at the edge of the road, wearing a cloak. I slowed down to find out what the child was doing out on its own near midnight when it spread its wings and revealed that it was a Great Horned Owl.

I've watched baby quail, following their mother, ducklings and goslings doing the same. Three baby owls learned to fly within my gaze, and I stopped the car and got out to visit with a young, downy owl in the middle of the road while its mother swooped low overhead. (I learned later from a young woman in the WSU Raptor Club that Mother Owl was probably looking for a place to land on my head, and that if she had, I'd have gone to the hospital with eight claws embedded in my skull, eaching exerting several hundred pounds' worth of pressure. A lucky escape. Only the late Queen Mother could carry off a feathered hat without looking ridiculous.)

I've played chicken with a baby coyote and a young female moose. The game was more fun (and less frightening) with the coyote. My two border collies have given us immense pleasure over the years because though they terrify repair and delivery men, no other animal on earth seems to fear them. Angus stood nose to nose with a full-grown porcupine for nearly forty-five minutes, and it never even bothered to raise its quills. Only last week, Fergus did a thing I'd never have imagined -- and if I didn't have two witnesses, I wouldn't report -- he herded five coyotes for more than an hour, making great sweeping circles around them on the hillside above our house. It was clear the coyotes didn't know what to think and, frankly, neither did I.

Ever seen a flock of cedar waxwings drunk on Mountain Ash berries? How about a porcupine, a deer, and an owl, all standing together on a large rock, like something out of a Disney cartoon. Bats roost at night in the corners of our porch. One of our chickens, a Rhode Island Red named Ginger, escaped from the pen and went feral. She ran with a flock of pheasants for nearly a year, disappearing one day to become a creature of myth and legend: the phicken, or was it the cheasant? We could never agree. My partner, Melynda, called her "The Bolter," after a character in Nancy Mitford's Love in a Cold Climate.

It's an Idaho rite of Spring to count robins (13 yesterday morning, stalking worms in the garden). I enjoy losing track of the Killdeer nests along the dirt road we call a driveway. I love the murders of crows, the kettles of hawks, and the gaggles of geese; there is always a parliament of fowls somewhere close by, often no farther away than the front porch.

Someone -- okay, some bastard -- is building a house on a hilltop about five miles from here. It's not close by East Coast standards, where when the neighbor blows his nose in his bathroom, you hear the noise in your kitchen, but we're not talking or thinking in Eastern terms. We're Westerners, and so we're angry and suspicious. We feel put upon, crowded, and invaded. We watch the progress of the construction through our bird-watching binoculars, and we bitter resent each shingle and every nail. What effect will this hilltop atrocity have on the migration patterns of the elk? Will we ever see 73 deer again in a single night?

I don't suppose these are earth-shattering concerns. Moscow, Idaho has 25,000 residents. Raleigh, the city of my birth, has 300,000 plus. And no deer that I could see. When is too soon to begin to worry?

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