Cardinal Grateful

Years ago when I was a letter carrier for USPS I went into an old two-story apartment quad. On the second floor there was a female cardinal that had gotten trapped inside. She had been flying into the window so many times she'd worn a patch of feathers off of her head. (I noted that her skin under the feathers is black.) I carried a towel with me and was able to toss it over her. Then I carefully carried her in my hands, shouldered the door open, and released her. I recall a man walking past as I opened my hands and she took to the skies. He kind of just stood there and gawked.

For the next half an hour or so she followed me down the street, landing on twigs and tree limbs whenever I stopped. I paused a few times to talk to her. I have never had any doubt that she was thanking me.

Not the cardinal I rescued, but one in the backyard of the condo where we lived in Matthews.

Very Little Wildlife

The last few trips I have taken to the North Carolina mountains have been disappointing as far as spotting wildlife is concerned. Over the past year I have seen almost nothing of note in my wandering through the wild and rural areas of our high country. I know it's just the luck of the draw, but it had been disappointing to be ready to see wildlife but encountering very little.

On the last full day we had at Van Hook, our camping companions Adam, Kelley, and their little boy Logan wanted to go fishing. So we went over to Cliffside Lake adjacent to the campground so that Adam and Logan could toss out the lures a few times. It was later in the afternoon, and the almost constant rain of four days had slackened enough to be able to allow them to go fishing.

While everyone else stayed to fish or watch someone fish, I opted to hike around the lake and try to spot some wildlife. And I did manage to see just a few things, which follow as photos and captions:

This is the dam which forms the lake. I haven't looked it up, but I would not be surprised to learn that it was a project of the Civilian Conservation Corps.

Looking across the lake. The dam and spillway are on the left.

I took this one while sitting on a picnic table on the far side of the lake from Carole, Adam, Kelley, and Logan. There was another family at this spot and they had me use their camera to take a family photograph of them.

Not sure what species this is. It was on the ground hunting for food.

This is a Pileated woodpecker. They are really big birds and their wings make a lot of noise when they take flight. Unfortunately, the ones I do encounter are really skittish and flee and move a lot to avoid humans. I couldn't quite focus my telephoto lens on this one before it vanished into the trees.

And this was one of two baby snapping turtles we saw at the edge of the lake. Well, that was some wildlife, but not what I was hoping to encounter. We did hear a couple of raccoons ramble through the campsite deep in the night (they woke Carole up). They didn't cause any mischief with us, but they did somehow steal two sticks of butter from the guy camping adjacent to us.

Lilly Mourns

I enjoy sharing my home with other animals. The experience deepens my conviction that animals are as capable of emotion and of compassion as any human being.

Our veterinarian had mentioned that Lilly might go into mourning for Marley. And it has proven so.


Lilly loved Marley tremendously. Being of such a mild disposition, Marley took to Lilly with great patience. She was just a tiny kitten when she came into our home, and Marley was fully grown. Still, he never allowed her energy and rambunctious spirit to get the better of him. He played with her most of the times she would attack him or tackle him or grasp him firmly about the neck. Marley put up with her batted blows, with her gnawing about his ears, with her playful kicks. In all of the time of her energetic attempts to get him to engage in play, I only ever saw him chastise her a single time. And that was toward the end, when he was probably feeling poorly and we were just too blind to see. All he did on that occasion was hold her down until she yipped for release.

The past day I have noticed that Lilly has been searching for her friend. Her playmate is nowhere to be found, and she cannot understand this. She goes to the sliding glass door and peers out, waiting to see if he has come home. She waits in the kitchen, expecting him to join her at the food dish, but he does not arrive.

And so, Lilly has taken to moping about. For the first time since we brought her home I have watched as she slumps listlessly. She curls up in the strangest of spots to sleep--places where she's never taken refuge. Today, she went to the foot of the bed and stretched out, lying in a heap, sighing from time to time and never once responding to our touch or to our pleading to get her to play.

Marley is gone, and Lilly is very sad.

I'll never understand people who feel no compassion for animals, nor understand that animals have feelings and emotions, too.

Critters Again

One thing that I can say about Florida:

It is freaking packed with wildlife. I go to many wild places in the eastern USA, and often I visit these so-called wilderness areas without once seeing anything more exotic than a beetle or spider. (Yes, such creatures have their charm, but I want to see more traditionally attractive wildlife.) For instance, just before my trip to Manatee Springs, I hiked down into the Linville Gorge, easily one of the wildest and most rugged places in the eastern half of the continent. And I didn't see a single bit of wildlife. Nothing. Nada. But if you visit a parkland or wildlife refuge in Florida you will almost certainly encounter wildlife, and lots of it. So it was on this trip. We are never disappointed when it comes to this aspect of visiting the unspoiled corners of our southernmost state.

A cormorant posing for us as we paddled along the Suwanee River on our first day at Manatee Springs State Park, before the flood waters got too deep and the river debris too heavy for paddling the current.

The ever-present common painted turtles. These guys were rather large, having avoided their two most potent predators, alligators and great herons.

Communal vulture tree. Filled with one of our two species of carrion eating raptors: the black vulture.

A closeup of a black vulture. These are actually very intelligent and impressive birds. I rather like them.

To partially steal a line:

"Old raccoon in the tree
Has his hungry eye on me."

This guy had been sitting in the tree above our campsite watching us until I started spying back. He was waiting, I'm sure, for a chance to steal something from the campsite. The raccoons at Manatee Springs were not nearly so bold as the ones at Blue Springs. After I eyed him for a bit, he climbed down and hauled ass into the forest.

Yeah, yeah. I know I opened up this blog with my vertebrate-centered chauvinism. However, this caterpillar we saw at Rainbow Springs was so impressive that I ended up taking about thirty photos of it. This was the only one that came out halfway decent. A more complicated critter you will never see in the so-called "higher" animals. (Click to embiggen and be stundified.)

One of a number of brown pelicans on the waterfront in downtown Cedar Key. Once critically endangered, they now are common since DDT was banned.

The deer in this part of Florida are quite, quite small. Not as tiny as the Key Deer, but pretty darned little. This doe was the biggest one we saw, and she would be dwarfed by a local white-tailed deer. I suspect she was pregnant. She looks rather more plump than any of the others we saw. I caught her in mid-slurp here, as she was licking her lips.

On the coldest day of our trip, a ranger came to our campsite to inform us that the spring was full of manatees. So we hustled down to get some shots. The rangers had the spring "off limits" to swimming. Believe it or not, many people wanted to get in with the manatees. Not that I was stunned at that (I enjoyed swimming with them last year), but because it was so damned cold. But then I was reminded that the water remains a constant 72 degrees no matter what. So the water would have felt quite comfortable. At any rate, we enjoyed watching them swim about and graze. I got this shot as this large individual rose to the surface for a gulp of air.

"What?" You ask. "No alligators?"

Indeed. This was the first trip to Florida that I've ever taken in which I didn't see any alligators. We saw only one--briefly--and a small one at that--while we were paddling down the Rainbow River. And we're not sure that it was a small alligator or a medium-sized alligator snapping turtle. All we caught were the ridges on its tail, so it might have been the snapping turtle.

Fellow Travelers

I thought I'd post some more critter photos I've taken in the years since I bought my first digital camera. In all of my camping and backpacking and hiking I've encountered quite a number and variety of Erf's critters. Sometimes they behave and sit relatively still so that I can photograph them.

And sometimes they flee before I can get off a shot, or they move too much so that the photographs are ruined. One animal that I most regret missing in my attempts to add it to my photo journals was a copperhead snake that I came very close to tramping upon. This was on one of the trails in Hanging Rock State Park here in North Carolina. I'd hiked a very long loop and was on my way back to my vehicle after a hot day of hiking the humid mountains there.

I'd just crossed a wooden foot bridge and happened to look down as I walked and realized that I was about to step on a copperhead lying in the trail. The thing about this particular snake is that it's colors were extremely vibrant. I'm certain that it had just shed its skin and I was seeing its new countenance in all of its virgin glory. The snake, realizing that I had appeared, quickly sped off, before I could snap a decent photograph. It's one of my regrets as a haphazard photographer.

There have also been many, many birds that I wanted to shoot with the camera, but who did not wish to pause long enough to accommodate my wishes.

Once, when I was alone and had pulled over on a grassy shoulder on the Blue Ridge Parkway, an enormous turkey came out of the forest and actually poked its head up high enough to look into the cab of my truck where I was sitting. I tell people about this, but no one believes me. He was the largest wild turkey I've ever seen. Of course, by the time I'd nabbed my camera, he'd fled into the woods on the opposites side of the Parkway.

Then there was the bear that I encountered on the Black Mountain Crest Trail one absolutely stunning November afternoon. But he was running away from me far too fast to get a decent shot, and he vanished into those black forests for which the mountains are named before I could even consider getting his picture. The really good critters are moving at a rapid clip, so it's very hard to prove to others that you ever saw them.

But sometimes you get lucky. I'll never forget the bear who grazed alongside the road in Beartown State Park in West Virginia. An actual wild bear outside of a National Park. He was wary of us, but not terribly afraid. As long as we didn't get too close to him, he was content to go about his life and allow us to watch him.

Point of View

Some of my fiction is told from the point of view of non-human animals.

Well, frankly, a lot of my fiction is told from the point of view of non-human animals.

The reason for this is because I have always sympathized with animals. And at a very early age I discovered the work of a gentleman named Ernest Thompson Seton who was an enormous influence on me, if not stylistically, then very much philosophically. Seton understood that many of the animals with whom we share this rock are possessed of the same depth of emotion, as are humans. They feel fear and hatred and love and are inquisitive and pursue happiness just as we do.

Over the years I’ve encountered just a few authors who seem to feel this way. There was, of course, Seton. But before I found the old Scot, there was Hugh Lofting and his silly tales of Doctor Doolittle that also appealed to me, if on a different level. I outgrew the children’s fables of Lofting, but never forgot the lessons taught in the fiction of Seton.

Everyone who shares space with a pet can tell you that they have experienced things that allow them to understand that these animals have feelings very similar to our own. The dog who comforts you when you’re sick or sad. The cat who cuddles beside you at bedtime. The parrot who figures out how to unlock her cage to explore the house at will. If you share a home with a pet you will assuredly come to understand that they are far more clever than you ever suspected and as possessed of the same range of emotions.

My wife and I had a Siamese cat named Cinnamon. She lived to be well over twenty years old and continually fascinated and amazed us with her antics and achievements. We are both convinced that she had a pretty wide vocabulary. We learned early on not to say the word “veterinarian”, else she would find a place to hide before we could whisk her away for medical treatment. Every morning she would hop up on my side of the bed, reach for my glasses on the bedside table and knock them to the floor. Why did she do this? She did this because she knew that by knocking my glasses to the floor that I would have to climb out of bed to retrieve them. And, generally, once out of bed I would almost always shuffle to the kitchen and open her a can of cat food. Get the big galoot up, and breakfast was assured. Knock the glasses off the table, and the big ape would rise. In effect, she had me trained.

If Cinnamon wanted out, she would only have to go to either the front door or back door and park herself in front of it. There, she would stare up at the doorknob until one of us opened the door for her. She couldn’t say the word, but she figured out another way to communicate the idea.

Another thing that Cinnamon would do is, if I ever left the kitchen without feeding her when she was hungry, she would chase me down the hall and wrap her paws around my ankle. No claws. Just those soft, furry paws in a clench about my ankle. Of course I would turn around and go feed her.

We currently have three cats. Marley, the stray we rescued who is a lazy, laid-back male. Lilly, the new kitten who already seems amazingly intelligent. And we have Sophie, who is nine years old and, as far as we can tell, as crazy as Mary Todd Lincoln. Although she has never known anything from us but love and devotion, she flinches at the slightest sound. She will climb up on the bed to spend the evening, but will only lie at my feet and refuses to advance any farther up the mattress. When I walk down the stairs, she will race ahead of me and fling herself on the landing and scream for attention and will only stop howling if I also pause to sit beside her and pay her lots of attention. Sophie is not terribly bright, but she is devoted to me.

If one spends any time watching wild creatures, there will also be many signs of the emotional depth present in them. I spend several weeks every year in various state and national parks. We have the great fortune to encounter lots of animals whenever we travel to rural or wild lands. I have witnessed some amazing things in watching these creatures going about their lives. Even such things as ghost crabs have surprised me in exhibiting actions that I can only interpret as emotional on their parts.

So it's no wonder that I've spent so much time filling my novels and stories with animals who are sometimes as emotionally extravagant as any human being.

Chimp as person

A certain hairless primate and his offspring swimming in Jacob's Fork in the North Carolina mountains twelve years ago.

Back Home

We've returned from our latest vacation. I pretty much live for these wonderful breaks in the monotony of labor. Carole and I have been lucky enough to pick some great vacation spots the past few years. One thing we enjoy doing is seeking out the freshwater springs in Florida to explore.

As usual, we enjoyed seeing the wild critters who inhabit these places. This time, however, we interacted with some of them a bit more than usual. We had a particularly stubborn raccoon at our campsite. This one managed to steal our hamburgers while our backs were turned, one of Carole's water shoes (why it wanted that, we haven't a clue), and I had to stand guard with a broom while Carole grilled salmon fillet so that the raccoon couldn't chase her away from the fish.

We reluctantly notified the rangers who set out traps. And that's a story unto itself. First, the traps succeeded in capturing only an innocent opposum, and later a scrub jay arrived to steal all of the bait out of the traps. Raccoon had three wins and a draw. And I had to carry a big stick to get the draw.

Cute? Not really. A very aggressive critter. I suspect it was a pregnant female in need of many calories. I had to stand guard with a broomstick while my wife cooked on the outside grill.

Argh! (Critters redux!)

There was some kind of internet glitch with my post yesterday that ate all of the photos. Rather than reload them all, I’ll just post something else.

These are a bare few of my favorite animal photos from my various trips the past two years to National Parks, state parks, National Forests, and wilderness areas.

This first one was on a visit to Hanging Rock State Park in North Carolina. It’s an unusual area—a classic monadnock. The high area has lots of exposed rock, and some spectacular waterfalls. I had been hiking in the hot summer sun and visited this waterfall where I took a bath. After washing the sweat off, I noticed that the stream passed through a narrow grotto beyond the falls and so I walked down to take a look. Inside the grotto, on the rock wall, was this very tiny bird nest which contained a single extremely small egg. It could have been a hummingbird nest—I don’t know. But I took this photo and it remains one of my favorites.

The next photo was taken in Silver River State Park in Florida. The Silver River emerges directly from the ground, its headwaters being the absolutely stunning and tremendous Silver Springs, around which was built a commercial amusement park. My family and I put our canoe into the Silver River at a county park and paddled up the river to the Silver Springs, thus avoiding any nasty admission fees. We’d been told that the area around the river was home to a large and growing population of feral rhesus monkeys. Escapees, according to tales, from various Tarzan movies filmed in the vicinity. The State of Florida has decided that the monkeys pose no risk to the area as an invasive species, and their numbers have increased somewhat. If you are lucky while paddling along the Silver River, you may encounter them. We were lucky enough to spot some, one of which I was able to photograph.

This guy had one of the most symmetrically perfect racks of any whitetail buck I’ve ever encountered. He was in a field inside Cades Cove in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. While certainly no record, he was just one of the most spectacular deer I’ve ever seen.

Continuing the deer theme, these were part of a small herd of extremely small Key deer that we saw on Big Pine Key in the Florida Keys. Endangered, these are a sub-species of the whitetail deer. Adapted to island ecology, these deer are very, very small. A fully grown buck is no larger than a medium-sized dog. This doe and fawns were very tiny, indeed.

While on one of my hikes to locate and photograph the world champion Sag Branch poplar tree, I noticed this red newt along he Boogerman Trail in the Cataloochee area of the park. It was chilly that morning, and the newt was sluggish, and in the midst of chowing down on an earthworm.

This fellow was sitting in the Silver River as we were cruising under paddle-power toward Silver Springs. I've seen many alligators in my travels, but this guy just seemed more than others to want us to go swimming.

These big boys were sitting along the river in Rock Island State Park in Tennessee as we were paddling by. Later, while rock-hopping, I found out why they were gathered there. They were sharing an enormous gar-fish lying on the rocks.

We met up with this hawk (red-shouldered hawk?) while camping at Juniper Springs Recreation Area in the Ocala National Forest in Florida. He kept trying to steal the steaks off our grill, but the heat kept him at bay. The ranger told us that he was a particularly talented thief and generally got away with quite a lot of people food every day.

This last photo is one of my favorites, if a bit blurry. We were paddling down a stream in Florida called Juniper Run, through the Juniper Prarie Wilderness Area (Ocala National Forest). We came around a bend in the crystal clear stream to see this racoon in the water, and just beyond a whitetail deer. Off to the right, out of sight of my lense, was a wild turkey. It was just very neat and very exciting to encounter so many different large animals together in one spot in a wilderness setting.