There's Something
Wild In Town
By DAVID II. IIKVDKRSOA
If you love the outdoors, whether
you be hunter, fisherman, or just ob¬
server of what the law calls ferrae
naturae, meaning live things in their
natural state, you’re more than just
aware of loss of habitat. You are at
least concerned, and probably down¬
right angry. So much invasion of na¬
ture by bulldozers, logging operations,
housing developments, off-road vehi¬
cles and the like, seems downright un¬
necessary. The dozers scrape clean the
cover needed for rabbits, quail and
song birds. The eroding afterwash
permanently destroys streams and
ponds, and there go the frogs and tur¬
tles, bass and bream. Clear-cutting
takes down every den-tree, and there’s
no hidey-hole for coons and possums
and woodpeckers. The low-watt men¬
tality that dictates exploitation without
compensating replacement is rapidly
depriving wildlife of any place to exist.
Or docs it?
I live in Charlotte, a southern city of
a quarter million population, and
rapidly growing. Another hundred and
fifty thousand crowd to the county
borders. But people are not all that live
here. The animals have come to town!
My house is only ten minutes, by car
and in traffic, from the central city's
skyline, forty-story buildings, bustling
retail stores, and gangs of people. Yet
the barred owls answer back on winter
afternoons, their eight-note calls un¬
mistakably identifying. And not in¬
frequently a pair of great-homed w ork
in my neighborhood, with the deep-
toned whoos that invaribly call me out¬
side to see if I can spot one against the
pale dawn sky as it sits in a big oak.
eighty feet above my driveway.
Everybody knows that possums
proliferate in almost any environment.
They must be awfully sexy to survive,
as many as lose in their mighty battle
with city cars. Obviously, not only
their mothers think they’re pretty. My
next-door neighbor calls me w ith some
regularity when a pair of local resi¬
dents insist on denning in her back¬
yard maple tree.
But it was a surprise the other night
when the Labrador turned treeing dog.
and in the forks of my massive white
oak. the spotlight picked out the
unique robber’s mask of a young coon.
He was safe enough up there, and we
let him be.
Now it always makes the news when
a moose wanders onto Main Street in
some little town in Maine, or a bear
invades a timber town in Michigan.
With us. though, struggling toward ur¬
banity. it's the variety of wildlife that’s
surprising. A duo of red-tail hawks
regularly sail over the intersection of a
cross street and the eight-lane
through-city freeway. Another pair
guard the golf course where I play,
only mildly annoyed by the crows that
have adopted a nearby pine grove as
home base. Last summer, a beautiful
specimen actually followed me from
tee to tee for four holes, intrigued
perhaps by my whistle. And on the
same golf course, two half-grown great
horned owls entertained us for a week
w hile they were "branching.’’ One fell
out and made a great subject for a
couple of local photographers before
they put him back. The dove popula¬
tion there is astounding, like little grey
chickens picking grass seed or gravel
from the cart paths. A few feathers in
the morning mark the owls’ nightly
depredation. And. in daylight. I
watched last week as one of the red-
tails struck a full-grown squirrel that
must have been supper for the unseen
young in the nest high in a big cedar.
Charlotte, deep in the South, sports
a permanent flock of fifty or so Canada
geese that, like a Maynard Reese
painting, grace an evening sky. and lift
the spirits of those of us w ho w ish we
were hunched in a Currituck blind.
And a friend reports that three deer
were standing in his suburban yard one
last winter’s morning, three miles in¬
side the city limits. Until five or six
years ago our county hadn’t seen a
wild deer in seventy-five years.
The personal pain, though, came last
week. Reared on the family farm, four
miles from the city's "square". I have
for fifty years watched the city limits
expand like some self-dividing
amoebic cell until a ten-mile trip south
barely reaches the perimeter. The
hundred-odd acres my dad bought in
the twenties had become a microcos-
mic game preserve. Nibbled down to
half size by sales to pay death levies
and ad valorem taxes, it still harbors
some fascinating creatures. This sum¬
mer. a vixen whelped four cubs there,
and almost every afternoon, one or
another strolled casually through the
yard of the old house. The four coveys
of quail gradually shrank, as trees and
shrubs took over the oncc-productivc
fields. Two coons devastated my little
roastin' ear patch, and even found a
way to take the lid off the garbage can.
A shikepokc. the local name for a
heron, sometimes croaks from the top
of a tulip poplar, though what he’s
doing so far from water. I really don’t
know. Must have nested somewhere
on the little creek, because we found a
feisty young’un squnched in a comer
of the garage, bravely defending his
honor with a formidable beak before
we shifted him off to the local nature
museum. A blue darter swooped on a
snake in the driveway back in the
spring and hoisted it. writhing and
twisting like a (ail on a kite. Rabbits put
me out of the garden business.
The trauma came with the sale of the
last tract. Suddenly. I have become a
co-conspirator with the developers. I
have sold out. and the foxes, the resi¬
dent barred ow l w ho sat curiously in a
fir tree when I paid my last visit
. . . Maybe ne.l week
о
bcof or moo»e>
THE STATE. NOVFMOtn 1983
