A Northwoods Almanac for Feb. 8 – 21, 2013
by John Bates
Cougar
A male cougar
was treed by hounds near the Chippewa Flowage in Sawyer County on Jan. 19. The
cougar was in some large dead white pines, but sat only about 15-20 feet
up. Adrian Wydeven, a mammalian ecologist with the WDNR, later followed
the tracks after the cougar left the tree and noted that its running strides
averaged 134” (range 122-147”) and its walking stride was 42” in dense cover
and 62” in more open cover. Russ Smith, an area resident who spotted the
cougar, took a number of photos and kindly consented to my use of one of them.
The cougar was estimated to weigh 160 pounds.
Another cougar was also apparently treed in eastern Price County on 12/28/12,
49 miles to the east, but there is no way of knowing if this was the same cat.
Predator-Prey
Gail
Rae Van Sluys wrote to me on
1/20 with the following:
“The
temperature warmed from a frigid -11 to -4 as the sun streamed through the wide
window, announcing a spectacular Sunday morning in January . . . We climbed a
gentle ridgeline, each footfall breaking the stillness of the trail with
snapping twigs and squeaking snow. Braced against a bone-chilling breeze, we
ascended a point overlooking the immense frozen lake and scanned the shoreline
for activity. Beneath the next point, less than a quarter mile ahead, a
dazzling deep blue flowage lapped at an edge of ice.
“We
focused our binoculars on the narrow passage of water, trying to capture the
rapture of otters fishing and frolicking. Instead, we saw the bushy tail of a
fox – but the colors were a mottled gray and brown. Now the body resembled a
coyote, trotting beneath the point jutting out from the opposite shore. Seconds
later, a tawny spindly-legged doe spilled out of the woods onto the ice. On the
far side of the deer, a second canid leapt from the forest.
“Startled,
the doe dashed for the open water and slipped on the icy edge. The wolves
converged on the helpless creature, lunging and snapping at flailing limbs.
Working together, one wolf found purchase on a hind leg while the other was a
flash of fur, helping its pack-mate drag the hapless creature toward the
opposite shore.
“Wild
predator and prey engaged in a brutal struggle for survival. I cringed with the
terror of the ambushed deer surrounded by gnashing teeth and blood-spattered
snow in its last minutes of life. Realizing its fate, I begged the wolves to
take the deer down quickly and end its misery. Evisceration was aggressive and
swift. Nature’s lesson was fierce and necessary – the wolves had to eat
and the deer was fair game.
“Several
hikers backed away to face another direction. After five minutes, the deer was
motionless as the wolves feasted. We trudged on toward the next point above the
carnage.
“Within
ten minutes we were directly across from the carcass. One wolf remained . . .
The lens of my binoculars steadied on the wolf’s sturdy frame as I studied the unmarred
markings of its finely patterned fur. The head swiveled, and for two long
seconds, two dark piercing eyes fixed steadily on my own.
“A
moment later the wolf turned to survey its surroundings . . . [and then he]
launched away in a long lope along the opposite shoreline. The confident
beautiful creature receded in the distance, leaving us stunned by death
shamelessly splayed atop pink and red-stained snow.
“In
our determination to find otters, we tramped on past the flowage and around the
bend. Slides and tracks paralleled the trail, but no one appeared. Too cold to
wait for activity, we backtracked past the kill site. The wolf had returned,
but immediately detected our presence and again loped away.
“Timing
is all. We never saw owls or otters. ”
Gail’s
story illustrates well how often our minds and hearts conflict over the issue
of predation. We’ve all seen copious data, scientific articles, and ecological
research on predator-prey relationships, all of which inevitably lead one to
support sustaining healthy populations of predators. But to witness the predation
of a large mammal by another mammal often places the heart deeply at odds with
what had previously been a comfortable intellectual understanding.
I,
too, am frequently conflicted in this way - for example, in exactly what Gail’s
story is about. I thoroughly believe in the need for reducing the deer
population and the value, and right, of predators in doing so. But watching an
animal get torn apart by another just plain hurts my heart despite what my mind
says. I also hurt when I see a deer dead beside the road, or see deer roped
down on the roofs of cars during hunting season, even though I’m simultaneously
rooting hard for hunters to maximize their kill.
Most
of us have a hierarchy of acceptable “hurt” when it comes to predation.
Watching a dragonfly capture a mosquito is cause for pleasure. Watching a
songbird then eat that dragonfly also elicits enjoyment (and no emotion for the
dragonfly). Watching an eagle or otter or walleye catch a fish is cause for greater
excitement yet, with rarely an emotional twinge for the fish. But as we move up
the continuum of “higher” animals, the heart starts responding. The fox
pouncing on a mouse, the sharp-shinned hawk grabbing a goldfinch, the great horned
owl grabbing a rabbit, the mink capturing a muskrat, the eagle taking a loon,
the bear taking a fawn, the wolf taking a doe – for many, a process that had
been a great moment to recount to others, now becomes painful to watch, even a
moment to become angry about, perhaps even a moment to wish the predator dead
instead of the prey.
All
this, of course, is elicited even while we live the irony of eating venison
that night for dinner, or perhaps a steak from a cow, a fish fry from some
perch, an elk we shot out West, a turtle we trapped, a rabbit or grouse we
shot.
All
species live at the expense of other species. That’s an intellectual given. But
to see it in reality, to hear a rabbit scream, or witness the terror of another
animal in a fight or flight for its life, well, that’s hard to reconcile.
I
debated whether to publish Gail’s story – I was concerned it would only give
the wolf haters more fodder, and perhaps even those who irrationally fear
wolves more reason to be fearful. But that’s the best reason for printing her
story. Our heartfelt hates and fears are mostly irrational – they don’t line up
with what our minds understand, or at least should understand. The very
difficult trick, and one I’m unlikely to ever master, is to have the intellect
and heart align, each listening to the other, and then seeing the natural world
for what it is. And what is it? It’s a place we like to simplify as full of winners
and losers, but it’s really one which is more amazingly dynamic and complex
than our hearts and minds can fully fathom. And while our emotions may cloud
our deeper wisdom at times, I’m glad that our hearts hurt when another species
dies. Without compassion, without empathy, what would we be?
Which
brings us back to the wolves. The campaign by some against predators has been
long standing. But so has our ecological understanding that prey need
predators. Aldo Leopold wrote 70 years ago, “Predators originally performed for
deer and elk the function of dispersal which most other species perform for
themselves. When we elect to remove deer and elk predators, we automatically
assume responsibility for performing their job. We have failed to do this
because we failed to realize that they had a job.”
Four years later, he added: “It cannot
be right, in the ecological sense, for the deer hunter to maintain his sport by
deer browsing out the forest, or for the bird-hunter to maintain his by
decimating the hawks and owls, or for the fisherman to maintain his by
decimating the herons, kingfishers, tern, and otters. Such tactics seek to achieve
one kind of conservation by destroying another, and thus they subvert the
integrity and stability of the community.”
Gail’s
finely written piece explores this wild natural community where we have all
chosen to live, and describes well the difficulty we have in reconciling the
role of large predators in it. I suspect most of us will always have a strong
visceral reaction to witnessing such events. How we respond over time speaks to
our sense of the preciousness of life, and our ability to bring our heart and
mind together in a deeper ecological understanding.
Other Sightings – Cardinals, Muskrats,
and an Albino Gray Squirrel
Cardinals: Bill and Cheryl Crawford in Harshaw had
the pleasure of being visited by a female cardinal last week. “She's very shy,”
wrote Bill, “and obviously not familiar with bird feeders. The chickadees and
the mob of finches and redpolls scare her away. So, we've been throwing black
sunflower seeds on the ground for her. Unfortunately, the neighborhood herd of
turkeys makes pretty short work of the seeds, too.
“We had a male cardinal earlier in the winter
but he only stuck around a few short days. In the seven years we've lived here,
those are the only two we've seen. And until you see a female, painted in some
of Mother Nature's most subtle colors, you forget how exquisite birds' colors
can be.”
Muskrats: Dean
Acheson was returning home a few weeks ago from doing a photo shoot at the
International Paralympic Committee's Nordic Skiing World Cup in Cable, when he
came across a dark, furry animal in the road. He noted, “Turning around, I
stopped just as it was finishing crossing the road. It immediately ran under
the car and it took some banging on the car's lower body work to ‘encourage’ it
to vacate its newly found shelter.
“The muskrat
hightailed it into the ditch where it pretended to hide in some short pines. I
got off a series of photos . . . I returned to the car to get the flash to open
up the shadows, and by then the muskrat had scampered 50 yards into the woods,
apparently headed to a swamp.
“While it was
annoyed by my presence, it sure beat being watched by a coyote or an owl. I
recall getting as close as 50 yards from a coyote in the Presque Isle area many
years ago as it prowled the road, gulping down young muskrats it came across in
the ditch. This was in the spring time.”
Albino Squirrel: Ferdy Goode in Woodruff sent a
picture of an albino gray squirrel that shows up occasionally in his back yard.
As of 2/7, we’re now receiving over 10
hours of sunlight a day, and we’ll hit 11 hours by 2/26 – it sure feels good to
have the light returning.
No comments:
Post a Comment