The owners of our summer home were very specific about not attracting wild animals into the house and I assumed that they meant chipmunks and groundhogs. Anyway, it was birds that I was really after.
American garden birds are much more colourful than ours. Goldfinches are canary-yellow and black, jays are an astonishing metallic blue and cardinals are scarlet all over. I needed to capture them all for my album, so on our first day I spent $100 on feeders and seed. Although we saw plenty of insect-eating birds such as warblers and fish-eating birds such as ospreys, eagles, and kingfishers, no garden birds showed up.
My failure to attract birds was probably due to being too deep in the Maine woods with no gardens near-by. I photographed tiny hummingbirds and one justifiably wary wild turkey.
Since we were having no success with the birds I turned my attention to the porcupines that lived under our deck and the three kinds of squirrels in the surrounding woods. I scattered seed on the ground and every night the porcupines came. If disturbed, they either turned and pointed their spiked tails at us or shambled off on pigeon toes. If pursued, they simply walked up a tree without changing gear.
Grey foxes, deer and skunks were caught in our lights and we hoped for a bobcat or even a lynx. We even put down a salt-lick that was big enough to feed a possible herd of moose but we only saw chipmunks on it. Then “Fatso” showed up.
This masked bandit was the largest and boldest raccoon that we had ever seen. He started hanging around in daylight so, to keep him in a photogenic spot, I put monkey-nuts on our log-pile. It was probably “Fatso” who destroyed the log pile to get at all the nuts but those oak logs were really heavy. Who else could it have been? We left Maine for New Hampshire without finding out.
Eastern black bears really are black. This one materialised from the darkness between the pines, stood on her hind legs and swiped at the dangling-bird feeders with her shovel-sized paws. Not satisfied with that, she bent the metal supports to the ground and ripped the feeders off with her teeth. If a bear drops anything it will spend a lot of time searching for it on the ground and, true to form, she dug up the flower beds and the raised vegetable patch to get every last seed, which took her close to the barbecue so she trashed that as well.
“That’s why we take our feeders in at night.” the lady of the house told me. “In bear-country we only feed the birds in winter, when the bears are asleep.”
Her place seemed more like “Squirrel City” to me, but it made me think about that heavy log-pile back in Maine.
(Another competition entry that failed.)
No comments:
Post a Comment