…Jane, after chronic insomnia, was finally ‘sleeping in’ this morning, preparatory to writing a very important scene; and as I’m delaying breakfast, letting her get her beauty sleep—
I spot the damned eagle, who has finally figured out the floating rings, making off with a fish I thought was one Jane’s two favorites.
I had to do something. I ran out, made yet another ring, floated it, got the winter cover on one end lifted to see who was missing (we are currently medicating Ari, who has a terrible wound in her head—we’re not sure from what, but we have our suspicions, and we had set up a 50 gallon enclosure to handle that, so I’ve been dealing with her. Fortunately we have an antipredator screen over her.) And one of Jane’s fish didn’t appear.
I had to tell her, because I had to tell her to watch the pond while I went after something else. She was terribly upset, and lost the scene she’d been trying to put together; and I went off after metal tent stakes and fishing line, in Eagle Prevention Plan #2. We don’t want to hurt the bird–but Plan 2 relies on the fabled eagle eyesight, which, with the common pigeon, is the best vision on the planet. We got colored fishing line and strung it at rim level like the work of a lunatic spider, with invisible metal tent spikes hammered in among the rocks.
We have our fingers crossed. That eagle was hanging about watching us, waiting for us to leave—but we did, having done that, and he hasn’t been back in the last several hours.
The good part is we can dispense with the floating rings for something less apparent to the human eye, but that we hope Mr. Eagle can see very well and go shop somewhere else.
The even better part is that Jane’s fish turned up. The one that was carried off was one of our ‘accidental koi,’ that neither of us remembers purchasing. Poor little fellow. We’re going to plant a memorial lily for him.
In the meanwhile, we’re just hoping Plan 2 succeeds.
Curses! Let’s hope the iggle takes the hint and goes elsewhere to do his shopping.
On the happier side, after having been AWOL for almost a month and a week respectively, we have the return of both Senor don Zorro Gato and our very bright kittyboy to the back yard. Zorro has obviously been socializing with someone; he is affectionate and ‘talks’ nonstop, although he is on the skinny side. It must be that Siamese gene pool at work, currently dozing on the back stoop. Bright Boy is more skittish. He used to watch me put out the food, now he retreats and hisses. He must have fun afoul of someone who disapproves of him.
Oh, so good!
I believe DH inadvertently named our clever kitty — Smartypants, after felis was clever enough to figure out he was being watched from the bathroom window, but still hissed at the person delivering the cat food.
Wow, eagles fishing in your back yard! I’m kinda jealous, actually.
I’ve been pretty close to a red-tailed hawk, and a sharp-shinned hawk, but not that close to a eagle! I think they are magnificent birds, although probably less so, if they were trying to eat my fish! I’m glad he didn’t get Jane’s favorite fish though.
Kind of like how squirrels are so cute and adorable until you are trying to feed the birds in your yard and the squirrels keep cleaning out your birdfeeder. Then, they get reduced to fuzzy tailed rodents and chased off.
I confess I have had unworthy and violent thoughts about this bird: Ben Franklin was right when he decried the eagle as a thief and promoted the turkey as our national symbol, a plain and honest, plentiful and quite edible bird.
We have eagle, golden and bald (this was the latter,) osprey, kingfisher, marmots (those have walked down our street), elk, moose (we have the golf course moose and the swimming pool moose,) coyotes (I’ve had those trotting down our urban street), wolves (a pack waiting for children at a school bus stop unnerved the parents,)—not to mention cougar (who would show up near our former apartment to get the baby marmots down the hill.) We never saw any, but I dreaded the thought of finding one doing a staredown with our cats through the patio door, even though we were on the third floor—we overhung the hill in question. We also have bear—grizzly and black (we have the hospital district bear, who shows up to raid the trash.)We have California quail (who appear on our street)and, oh, yes, racooons and the great blue herons, both of whom have a culinary interest in our pond, but who thanks to our other precautions (the floating winter shelter ring) they haven’t gotten one—not for want of trying.
That’s great that you all have so many wild animals and birds around! Very cute how they get identified by their location. 🙂 Bremerton is a bit too urbanized to have that much variety.
I’ve got some raccoon I feed on occasion and of course a couple of neighborhood kitties. Occasionally a bald eagle flies by, but we have to go up along the Hood canal to really see any wild life.
Luckily my ex-hubby (who’s still a great friend) can spot animals and birds even while driving, so Lance and I go once a year on a road trip with him (and his new wife) and we hit some really great wildlife refuges, when he can see and point out all sorts of cool things. We even saw a wolverine once, albeit fleetingly.
But I’m glad those winter shelter rings work so well with all the other animals. I know my ex tried to put koi in his pond and the raccoon pretty well cleaned them out within a couple days.
I hate that it got even the accidental koi. (expletives and epithets deleted)bird! Do you want to go in this direction? http://www.pondbiz.com/page_3779_423/heroncritter-protection-net
Off topic but did you read that Wednesday Curiosity tweeted happy birthday to the late Ray Bradbury (who would have been 92), and that they’re naming Curiosity’s landing point “Bradbury Landing”? Mentioned was his ‘The Martian Chronicles’ and how he had inspired the imagination of many of the NASA folk.
What an absolutely marvelous story! I hope they do followups on her.
We really hope he sees the lines and just goes away. He’s truly a beautiful fellow.
Also off topic, somewhat, but speaking of bald eagles, here’s an amazing video … “Beauty and the Beak” … that some may enjoy. http://www.vimeo.com/15184546
I’ve always had some disdain for people who aggitate for predators in the environment that will be fed by the property of others.
The guy in Portland to whom it’s so important to know that somewhere in Oregon there will be a wolf howling tonight, is implicitly thinking “somewhere else” Not In My Back Yard. They get aggitated when there are coyotes in the neighborhood preying on the cats. Part and parcel, ain’t it? Wanna take land for a wildlife sancturary? Fine, then you and your group live off of it’s produce, free up the produce of farms and ranches for others to live off of.
They have romantic emotional responses for some imaginary “wilds”, when they should be tempering it with hard intellectual analysis of the economics of predator/prey relationships in a country where the best lands are “owned” and commercialized. In a world increasingly pressed to feed its growing human population, sentimental attachments to some perceived or imaginary natural world of centuries or millenia ago, will have to go by the wayside.
The Willamette Valley is wonderful farmland. But “natural” before the Oregon Trail? It hasn’t been “natural” for thousands of years. The Native Americans burned it regularly and deliberately!
I hope the new plan works for the eagle! My trouble is the ubiquitous raccoons raiding the bird food, but oh well. I get good pictures now and then.
I have off-topic news. After five years, Russ (husband) is leaving the job in New York for one in Omaha (90 miles away). Finally! Yay! I’ve only seen him three times a year for the last five years, so this is going to be really, really nice!
Much kitty celebrating going on here.
Oh, Zette! Wonderful news! TOgether again and within reach!
We are going ever so slightly crazed here trying to figure out just exactly how to make this work. But you know . . . Yay!
Oh, this is fabulous news! I’m so glad for you!
That is absolutely fantastic news for the two of you!!! Thank you for letting everyone know.
Paul, I agree: a realistic view of wildlife includes living with them and figuring you do have a right to protect yourself when the wildlife gets out of bounds…but along with that goes not petting the moose that shows up on the golf course. I grew up next to a wildlife refuge in Oklahoma…which included critters that go where they want to: buffalo, which share one brain, when they’re in a group, and if one jumps, all move.
I love Spokane FOR its wildlife, and I love the big birds even if fricassee has occurred to me: you don’t see us doing harm to any creature, even that opportunistic eagle. The harm he’ll get from us, the lazy sod, is having to fly another three miles toward a perfectly wonderful fishing ground in the Spokane river, Latah Creek, the Little Spokane, or if that fails, 20 miles on to Lake Coeur d’Alene, all of which support his species in style. The rest of the city is very much behind our pesky wildlife. The marmots in the heart of town (Spokane Falls) are the most protected, pampered groundhogs short of Pauxetawney Phil, and free of cages, I might add. They live in the rocks on riverside. People just figure if you live on the fringes, you’re going to have to protect your flowerbeds from turkeys and deer…daily. We don’t have rabbits in the cabbages. We have Bambi. And his whole tribe. What amazes me is that literally I live within a couple of miles of city center, and I have all this wildlife traffic right down the paved street in the early morning. I’m not even suburban. I’m urban core. But we have a lot of trees, and a lot of rocks—big swells of old volcanic outbursts make some amazing lawn ornaments, and occasionally make things that you just can’t incorporate: you put a sidewalk past them, but bears and coyotes and marmots use those wild spots as a highway—what time they don’t just shortcut down the street.
Most of our animals are shy, and travel by early morning, which is a good thing, keeping people and critters from bumping into each other. Moose rut is the time when you may see the annual headline of Moose in Pool, etc, and a big effort to extract the (I’m convinced) annual same moose from the same pool.
We have a duck that persists in nesting every year on the downtown bank ledge.
We have lots of ducks and geese. We did have a trio of mallards (like the Ramans,they come in threes) on our pond briefly, but they found nothing of their sort of food, so they moved on. Which is a good thing: they can really mess up small pond chemistry.
But so far, so good, today. We’re really suspicious that Ari’s head wound is due to that eagle and a prior try at our largest fish. We don’t know whether we can save her, but we’re sure trying.
And there’s not been a repeat today. I think he’s very accurately seen what we’ve done and he can’t figure it. Yet. The netting is a possibility…but VERY difficult to deploy and visually ‘there.’ The single strands glitter when the sun hits them but are otherwise not that ‘there’ to our eyes. WE are going to have koi, and we are going to work out how to do it safely for fish and predators.
We’ve stopped the raccoons: the floating ring covered in sunscreen makes a shelter in the deep end, and they can’t both swim and catch fish. Occasionally we add water hyacinth, which was really funny the time a raccoon thought he was going to walk on that. We had plants everywhere, and a full head count on the fish.
Herons are balked by the same thing. Our bridge is too high above the water, our sides slope and they can’t stand in the pond except at one end, and our fish are not stupid. So their favorite tactic won’t work.
Now we just need to figure out the snatch-and-grab artists.
Yes, I think the point we agree on is “civilized” American culture has sentimental, romantic, Rousseauian, attitudes about nature that have a good aproximation of zero as compared to the real world. Nature is not sentimental. (“Heaven and earth are impartial; they see the ten thousand things as straw dogs.” Tao Te Ching, v5, Lao Tsu)
The real world of Nature is as tightly constrained by economics as Wall Street. The cat is an ambush hunter because it’s kind have little stamina–a minute, and it’s all over one way or the other–it can’t expend more energy capturing food than it gets digesting the food! But “the wolf eats by its feet” as native Americans say. It’s “dog trot” expends little energy wastefully. It’ll be on your trail all day. Neither can risk a delibitating injury.
But Americans are besotted by “Bambi”, perhaps in these terms the “worst movie ever made”. It’s a human-hearted story, so it should have been a story cast among humans!
Mankind makes simple laws. “Thou shalt not…” It draws lines in the sand where it wishes them to be. “This square block shall be preserved as Yellowstone National Park.” Nature does neither.
We are wrong to have sentimental feelings about the loss of the wilds, which drives some conservationists. It was never ours!
Above all, when it comes right down to it, people are great hypocrites. For all their protestations, for all the unintended consequences, mankind will sacrifice everything for its own survival, even if it doesn’t know how. 😉
Paul, I don’t understand all your points. I quite understand that lines on a map have nothing to do with the real world, and the the anthropomorhized (sp??) creatures of a Disney film don’t, either. But what do you mean by “We are wrong to have sentimental feelings about the loss of the wilds, which drives some conservationists. It was never ours!” That is just the point, we do not own the world and have not the right to assume that humans are more important than every other form of life on the planet.
And yes, I do my best to walk the walk, not just talk the talk. I live frugally, “”using it up and wearing it out” rather than buying new resources constantly. I admit I have a few inconsistencies — I slap a mosquito as fast as anyone. But when I see open country turned into freeways and parking lots, I am sad and angry. This is not sentimentalism. This is disgust at the selfishness and short-sightedness of society.
I’m not surprized, much of it was laced with irony and cynicism. And in a way, that’s part of my point–it’s very complicated.
Why are you disgusted? Because you have an emotional attachment to a particular view of the world, that one way is better than the other. Objectively that’s certainly the case–I know what breathing in LA was like in the late 50’s and 60’s. But you’re expressing a sentimental attraction to what you perceive to be “the Natural World”.
But you touched on the point. The point you make that “humans don’t have the right” is a moral argument, but (sadly) irrelevant. We will take the right.
Remember when our management of Yellowstone burned it all down? Yes, there are now wolves running in the Lamar Valley and Druid Mtn, but ranchers won’t let bison migrate out of the park for fear of brucellosis, not to mention packs leaving the park. What does that tell us about commitment?
A few years ago when Southern Oregon was short on rain, the mean nasty old government cut off water to the Klamath Basin farmers to satisfy treaty needs for salmon on the river. The farmers took matters into their own hands, and the next year (same conditions) the farmers got the water, the river ran low and hot, and hundreds of thousands of salmon died all the way to the Pacific Ocean, killing off one whole run, the last year’s smolts, and the run 4-5 years in the future that was never laid. Do you remember that? It was in all the news.
Feeling sad that open country gets developed isn’t going to cut it! What are you prepared to do to stop it? Who’s going to tell people they can’t?
You may be frugal, so am I, on Social Securty. “Use it up, wear it out, make do or do without.” But when the population grows, will you condemn people to starve so packs of wolves can run in the Blue Mountains of eastern Oregon, or the migrating waterfowl can have their wetlands? I don’t think so! Is that ultimately self destructive? Certainly. So can we control ourselves to the “carrying capacity” of the planet and allow virgin Amazon rainforests? The evidence is that we cannot, and will not. Look at the satellite photos! In short, we’re screwed.
The “natural” environment, as most people would define it, became an oxymoron as early as the beginning of the paleolithic era when man started to use tools to change the land and sealed the fate of who knows how many extinct species. As an example, the aboriginal Americans had no useful domestic species other than dogs before the Spaniards came because their ancestors had hunted all of the best prospects to extinction.
Intellectual honesty and introspection seem to be inversely related to a person’s decibel and political activity levels – on either side of the green debates.
I lived in a rural county and we had a county commissioner who stated in a public meeting that there were “good” coyotes and “bad” coyotes and that we must only trap the bad ones. I’m certain that the primary differences between “good” and “bad” coyotes were centered on method, opportunity and/or luck. After I had seen more than a few gruesome scenes, the only reasons I could never bag one of the numerous resident or transient coyotes on our place were 1) I’m a lousy shot, 2) our Winchester 25-35 would jam after the first round, 3) they’re an incredibly difficult target. And no, I don’t really owe any of them a lamb dinner.
I haz an even bigger sad: Neil Armstrong just passed away, from complications from his recent heart surgery. Godspeed.
Dirk Flinthart, a Tasmanian writer, has a thought-provoking post on this:
http://dirkflinthart.blogspot.com/?zx=3e45f8604b1bc8a1
(Yes, you have to click on past Blogger’s nanny content warning.)
My immediate neighbor has a man-made stream with several ponds filled with goldfish and koi and we have regular visits from Great Blue Herons and bald eagles. It’s a huge system that I greatly covet. They do foil the eagles with carefully planted trees so the bird can’t get a good run in. The heron is the biggest problem. She said that raccoons don’t really take any fish because of the depth of the ponds although we have our share of the critters running about. She’s hoping that her fences will keep river otters out….as those are the biggest risk of all.
Once I had a run in with the local Great Blue Herons, I covered all my outdoor fish ponds which are much smaller than yours or my neighbors, and the bald eagle who likes to roost in my Douglas firs and get the chickens/roosters/local crows going doesn’t take a shot at my fish. It also isn’t taking poultry. The local raccoons are put off by the Siberian husky pee (good boy, Adak!). As mentioned, my biggest fear is river otters. Those will wipe you out in a night. I need to take a trip to Pan Intercorp to see how they foiled the otters who wiped out multiple thousands of dollars worth of koi in their ponds a year or so back. I’m close enough to a salmon stream to have that worry.
There is a tale of a rescue Siberian husky who was put into the system after raiding a koi pond. One of my old gals did catch a white goldfish (who survived the event), but I typically don’t have to worry about my dogs supplimenting their diet with my fish.
If you take a trip over the mountains to Bothell on September 8-9, the Washington Koi and Water Garden Society show is back at Country Village. I love picking up some little baby koi there to add to the collection. They are often fingerlings brought over from Japan by Pan Intercorp and higher quality than you find at the local fish store.
http://www.countryvillagebothell.com/koi-show
And the show is so close to Pan Intercorp and Moorehaven Water Gardens, it’s worth thinking about a grand tour!