Cooperative Living

It’s Point Roberts, so I could be writing about trash, of course; or about the garden, or strawberries, or wildlife, or even the border because what else do we do up here? Today it’s strawberries and wildlife.

When we left for B.C. two weeks ago, the slugs, not me, were eating the newly ripened strawberries, and as I left, I removed the nets that were keeping the raccoons out. As part of the live and let-live deal with the wild life, I figured that the raccoons ought to have an even chance with the slugs at the berries, or at least they ought to once my desires were out of the picture.

Upon our return, I didn’t rush out to see what had happened because I figured I knew what had happened. Between them, the raccoons and slugs ate all the berries. However, when I did chance to look at the three beds, I discovered that they were filled with strawberries, ripe strawberries. Apparently, it was too dry for the slugs (no rain during that absence and no watering of the strawberries except from the water table which is fairly high near the strawberry beds) and the raccoons, I assume, are on vacation.

I gathered a basket full and we ate these lovely, succulent, deep red and sweet strawberries for dessert last night: a little powdered sugar added to my bowl, a little demerarra sugar added to Ed’s. And this morning, I went out and gathered another quantity…about two quarts in all. But this morning’s gathering, on my hands and knees caused me to notice that about half of the leaves of the strawberry plants were missing, the stems, though, sticking straight up. The mark of deer munching.

Almost too much cooperative living to my mind, I’m afraid. Surely something else is going on here, but I don’t know what it is.

Cooperative Living

(A cheeky bunch, the deer; or maybe they just have a special appreciation for Ed when he comes by with his camera.)

Here is the deer thinking; here is the deer eating. She and her friends have consumed all the still-very-small fruits and leaves off the lower branches of our (remaining) apple tree and off of all our neighbors’ apple trees. In the same way that she and her friends ate the leaves and not the flowers from the hydrangeas, she and her friends have found a way to share by leaving the fruits on the higher branches for us. I am hoping that she is discussing this effective strategy with the bears. As well as pointing out that if you break the tree down to the ground, as he did, there are no fruits after that for anybody.

But quite apart from that, this is the first year the deer have paid any attention to our apple tree, either early or late. Must be something going on with this big change in eating behaviors.

Dry Days

After four weeks of no rain, we had about ten minutes worth this morning around 6 a.m. I heard it and didn’t realize, at first, what it was. But it didn’t matter that it was rain because it didn’t rain either long enough or hard enough to offer much to any plant in need. Usually, we can rely on at least one day of rain any time we are away from either garden for two weeks, so I wasn’t really sure what to expect when we got back to the Canadian garden.

When we left, the dozen or so peony bushes were just starting to bloom. When we returned, they were mostly still in bloom, with a few buds just barely opening. It turns out that not having been rained on was a favor because, although I had tied them up, that’s usually not enough to keep them from breaking off if they get a lot of water from above. But here I was without a single broken down peony bloom. All the other expected bloomers were coming along fine, although the blueberry bushes looked a little puny in their berryness. But it was pleasing to see that they can take care of themselves more than I might think (this may be like children?).

On the other hand, the deer apparently didn’t have enough water around to please them so they ate all the leaves (but none of the flowerette buds—too dry?) from the hydrangea bushes in the front yard, but entirely left alone the larger hydrangeas in the driveway which they walk by on their normal pathway after they leave the front yard. I’ve never had them eat hydrangeas before now, but I never had them eat English ivy before this winter (although they could eat that stuff day and night and not get a peep out of me). In any case, it is the flowers that I find most appealing in the hydrangea, so perhaps this is simply an example of the deer finding a way to live cooperatively with me.

Poking around on the net, I found an interesting list of plants that deer may not eat, or may not eat too often, or too much of, or too thoroughly, and various other categories. The author warns, however, that ‘deer don’t read lists.’ She does advise that they occasionally eat hydrangeas and often eat English ivy. (The photo is last year's hydrangea with the recommended leaves AND flowers. We'll see what it looks like this year with flowers but no leaves.)

News Travels

The weather has been terrific these past few days so we’ve been investing as much of our time as we are physically capable of investing (there has been a crisis there, as well as in the financial markets) in getting the garden up for the summer. Some seed and plantlet planting and transplanting, but mostly (still) just clearing out all the weeds/undesired plants that have made a nuisance (from my perspective) of themselves over the past eight weeks. Ed has had the pruning saw at hand for days, not least because we had a tall maple die over the winter and, because its barren branches are close to the house, it needs to move on to its next life/death cycle station, which would be firewood.

Much of the yard/garden is to be admired already. Not my good work, but its own. The rhododendrons and azaleas are moving in from where the tulips and daffodils and croci and lunaria left off. The lilacs are perfuming the air around. This is really the peak time for flowering in the northwest. The raspberries, too, have joined the move to excellence, and both patches are tall and covered with buds. I’ve replaced their ropes and added new stakes where needed. Only yesterday, I was saying to myself that the side yard raspberry patch (which has terrific natural water flow and excellent sun) was looking better than it ever has.

Such hubris, of course, does not go unnoticed, even if you don’t bother to say it out loud. Thoughts, like words, get around. This morning, I went by that raspberry patch on my way to somewhere else and found that the tops of all the plants around the outer perimeter had been eaten off, including those darling little berry buds. Deer through in the early morning, I’d guess. A nice breakfast.

Oh, Deer

The deer came in the early hours of the morning and ate not only all the tulip leaves (no buds on offer), but also all the crocuses--stems and flowers--and, for dessert, chose grape hyacinths. In eighteen years, I have never had the deer eat either croci or grape hyacinths. They did not eat the standard hyacinths this time, but perhaps only because said hyacinths had not yet gotten their leaves up above the piles of leaves on that bed. They did not eat the daffodils because they don't eat daffodils, but then, in my experience, they don't eat croci or grape hyacinths either. So, what's the good of learning from experience, if it doesn't work?

There is yet snow here on the Sunshine Coast, right in peoples' yards and driveways, but only up above the highway. We have no snow at our house, but we have deer, of course. And gray skies and temperatures in the low 40's. Everyone is feeling kind of down and what they talk about in relation to that is not the financial world but the weather, the lack of spring. Canadians here are particularly inclined to see some part of the world that is warmer in February, and then they return in March to the north, where at least it is not snowing. Now, they are thinking of revisiting the southerly parts of North America for a March session.

Maybe it's not the weather, though; maybe it is just that we all thought it would be better come January 22 (correction: January 21, says Ed), and now it isn't. And worse yet, we are going to have to hear about the X-million dollar contract that George Bush got to tell the world about his fabulous decision skills. It never rains but it pours...

Playing Poker

I don’t actually play poker, largely because my older brother taught me how when I was a kid and that means I think of poker simply as I game in which I will lose. But I vaguely know the rules even now because my grandchildren, when visiting, are avid poker players, their stakes the bowl of foreign coins that we have collected over the past few decades when traveling. So I have up-to-date observations of a lot of games, a lot of talk about what beats what.

In any case, here’s the hand. Of recent days, I have written of my bear, my deer, my owl. They would appear to be my bet. Today, though, my son tells me that today at 10 a.m. in his yard (in central, semi-rural California) he has a cougar with a chicken in its mouth. And yet later today, my older daughter reports, from a small town in New Mexico, that she and her border collie spent some time along the riverbank with a gray fox. The fox gave her and her dog a mildly interested look and then went about his fox work in plain view for some time.

So, what I need to know is this: Does an bear eating compost and a separate deer eating grass (the latter combined with a sleeping owl) beat a cougar with a chicken in its mouth? Or even a gray fox in a small town with a collie in plain sight? Not only that: I knew there were bear, deer, and owl around; he didn’t know he had cougars, and she thought the local gray fox had all been killed. Am I winning or losing? And if I’m losing, what do I need next? A raccoon in a Santa Claus suit?

Or is this just another piece of evidence, somehow, that the financial system is getting worse?

Deer Not Interrupted

This morning I ran into a young doe in my neighbor’s yard; ran into it in an almost literal sense: I turned a corner round an apple tree and there she was, eating on the other side of the tree. Forbidden fruit, indeed. I was surprised, but she wasn’t. She gave me an indifferent stare and then looked away as if I weren’t worth bothering about. (And indeed I’m not.) A few minutes later, after I had gone up to the neighbor’s porch, she moved on to eat from their raspberry bushes, fruit that is just beginning to be adequately ripe. Later I found her in my yard, but there she was not finding much to eat as I don’t grow much that deer like. But nowhere was she the least bit fearful.

The thing was that the deer was not in the least opposed to sharing that space with me. Nor with my friend’s husband who went out yelling, waving a stick, and wielding a turned-on hose. Couldn’t care less, was the look on her face. Couldn’t care less about any of us. Previously, deer in this yard have been seldom seen and very, very skittish when passing through. But this summer, they are around frequently and behaving like very large pets. That doesn’t really seem right. I’m tolerant of wild animals, but I like them to be wild, or at least wild enough to have second thoughts about the wisdom of hanging out with people.

Something’s changing, I suppose. That’s why they are here more frequently; that’s why they are less shy. Fewer acres they can call their own, more experience with our presence, maybe less water outside peoples’ yards where ‘water features,’ as the gardening magazines call these small and not-so-small ponds are common. Doubtless, global warming has some role in their newly familiar presence. It seems to be a part of everything we notice.

Al Gore wants something of me in this respect, but I don’t exactly know what it is. I was reading an article in a recent New Yorker about an island in Denmark that is energy independent. It took them ten years to get to that point, but they did it. Experts involved said that the technology was entirely available for doing this. And I got to thinking about whether, if I knew how to access and incorporate that technology in my own life, would I do it? Probably not. It’s just me and what difference would that make?

But of course, that’s the whole point and the whole problem. We are spending countless hours and dollars and psychic energy carrying on about the most trivial things, the most pointless things: things that don’t matter in the least, ranging from choosing a fancy handbag that we have no need of to fighting a war in Iraq in which we do not even understand who it is that we are trying to defeat. (Granted, that war matters a lot to the people involved, but not to most Americans: we just want out in the quickest, least embarrassing way. That war is over for us, just as the war in Vietnam was over long before we stopped and formally called it quits.) But no energy for global warming, for what looks like an ecologic catastrophe. We are, I guess, waiting for someone to lead us, to tell us specifically what to do, because if we don’t all do it, it won’t matter. And whoever passes for a leader nowadays (the kind that has some actual power to do something) is waiting for us to demand that they lead, I guess.

But whether they lead or not, whether we demand it or not, change of a sort that is not going to be easy is coming. Ten years, it took the Samso Islanders. Ten years from when they decided that they might do something of this sort. How many deer will be in my yard in ten years? Maybe, like the deer who seem to be moving from their own land to ours, we will just have to take over some other peoples’ yards--yards that provide us with more of what we want. Or does that already explain how we got to Iraq?

Meet the Old Neighbors!

Yesterday, Ed and I were sitting on the porch having mid-afternoon coffee and observing the various changes in the yard that the slowly advancing spring was making. There are pasque flowers blooming, even though Easter came through quite a while ago; daffodils and tulips are making a simultaneous appearance, even though the tulips normally don't start until the daffs are finished; and lilac buds are yet tightly furled, although they usually bloom by May 1st. I’m afraid that won’t happen this year, but it’s all to the good, I suppose, since I will be gone by then.

As we talked, into the yard strolled a medium-sized deer. It was the second deer I’d seen this week, which is unusual. They’re around all the time, but I don’t usually see them: just signs of their passing. This one was about 15 feet away from us and he stopped to eat the leaves off the rose bushes. These are rugosa roses, very fragrant but not awfully showy bushes and we have rows of them, so I wasn’t too concerned about the deer’s feeding. But I was surprised to note that I had never before seen them do this nor seen any evidence of their doing it. They eat blackberries regularly and you can see where they have been lunching, but no sign on the rose bushes. We were talking and the deer was paying no particular notice to us. Then a second, smaller deer wandered in; the two touched noses communicating something about the quality of the rose leaves, maybe, because the second one did not participate in the lunch. But the two of them stood there, looking around, cocking their ears, for all the world as if they were concerned about something. But it definitely wasn’t us. Never glanced our way.

Earlier in the day, I’d been walking up the road when I came upon a 15-inch snake of the grass sort: yellow stripes and a darting red tongue. When I first saw him, he was so still I thought he was dead. I was standing right next to him and there was no sign of life in him. Then I nudged him slightly with my foot and, although he did not move his body, he did make his red tongue go in and out very fast. This seems an evolutionarily weak response. I mean, my foot was nowhere near his tongue so it’s hard to think that he was actually concerned about me standing there, enormous me.

We have raccoons around all the time, too. Here they mostly come round at night and we hear them rattling around more often than we see them. But down in Point Roberts, they are perfectly content to walk within five feet of us and never give us a glance. It almost seems rude, their failure to acknowledge our presence. Hummingbirds, too, fly in and around us desperate for sugar water but without any concern about us. These are an interesting kind of neighbor, and it is always a little strange, after years of city living, to have them around so much of the time. And to have them so uninterested in us. The bears are not like that, though. They see you, they move right off. Of course, when I see them, I’m inclined to move right off too. The cougars, I never see; but they see me, I imagine.

When I first came here, I would voice some alarm about the bears, but long-time residents would say, ‘What did you expect? You moved to a place where there are bears.’ I got the message quickly: you don’t want to live with bears, don’t move here. I’m okay with them, now, but I never expected to live with wild animals who were absolutely indifferent to my presence. Don’t they know I could be dangerous?

The Insults of Spring

Workshop blog posting

2/29/08

The Insults of Spring

A cold and moderately wet drive down to the U.S., a good-natured border guard (who knows us and waves us through) barely looks at us and our heavily laden car as we came through, a disappointing two-weeks worth of mail. It is noteworthy that when you get mail at two week intervals how little mail interest arrives. There are the good magazines, of course: The New Yorker, Harper’s, American Spectator, Atlantic; and there are bills, which are important but not interesting; and there are a few random adverts, but not nearly as many as I receive every morning in the overnight email. But, the one great blessing of snail mail, no communiques urging me to have my penis enlarged.

The crocuses (the croci?) are up and open thoughout the garden which means they got at least a few minutes of sun today. Big purple, yellow, and white blossoms reminding us that it’s gonna happen! Daffodils are 6-8 inches tall everywhere I look; Indian plum bushes are almost fully leafed out, the apple tree buds have discernible color, the currant and forsythia bushes are also pushing color in blossoms and leaves. It’s all looking good. Until I check on the tulips.

The tulips--I plant about 4-5 dozen each year, so there are plenty of them around, even though they don’t all come back from year to year—were about 4 inches tall or so when I left two weeks ago. Today, they are plentiful, but they are about three-quarters of an inch tall. And there are footprints all over the place. The local deer have dropped by while we were gone and munched them all almost right to the dirt level.

That’s the first time this has happened down in Point Roberts, although deer are notorious tulip eaters. In Roberts Creek, B.C., where we have big woods and deer and bear and cougar around, the deer are such a burden that I don’t plant tulips anymore. But here? The deer population is small because there’s not enough habitat for many of them. We see them occasionally, so I usually put all our saved hair scraps out around the tulips when they start to come up. Somewhere, I read that they are put off by human hair and, since Ed and I continue to have a lot of it, we save the cuttings to fend off the deer. And it or something has worked. Two weeks ago when we left, I did think that I ought to put the hair wreaths out, but I lazed out: plenty of time when we get back.

Yet another opportunity to be proved wrong. An hour after we arrive, the remains of the tulips are hair encircled. Who knows? Maybe there’s something there, still under the ground with a bud in it, even if its leaves are severely truncated. Something else to wait for. And the birds will eventually use the hair for their nests.