City wild

This morning, in my daily outing with the dogs, I took a longer walk than usual and when I turned into one of the less familiar streets I saw the Cooper's hawk that lives in our neighborhood lifting from the sidewalk, carrying what must have been a small mouse in its powerful claws, given the desperate squeaks I heard as it vanished into the trees. Poor mouse, I thought. Lucky hawk.

I find it fascinating that in a small city like ours we have such a variety of fauna. Truly, walking in my neighborhood or simply sitting in our dining room looking out onto the small deck and watching nature unfold is almost like a Discovery Channel program. I heard once on NPR that Central Park in New York City has tens of thousands of species. Obviously, we can't boast those numbers in our city but we've counted more than 20 different species of birds at our feeder, including the Cooper's hawk, which likes to hunt in our yard although I've never seen him catch anything.

Apart from the multitudes of hungry squirrels and the noisy conventions of birds, we also have several rabbits that in the spring actually wait for me in the mornings to put out the bird feed on the ground. We also have an opossum, which I call Lazarus, because the dog has attacked him three times and after convincing me without a shred of doubt that this time he's given up the ghost, Lazarus has literally risen from the dead (as opossums do) and disappeared obviously unscathed into his secret burrow.

I can see why they call it "playing opossum" and Lazarus should get an Oscar for his performance. Every time the dog has gotten to him, usually in the early morning hours when it's still pitch dark or in the late evening hours when he's not expecting the dogs to be out, Lazarus just lies there with gaping mouth open in a wide grimace of death, tongue hanging out, beady eyes fixed, with no visible signs of breathing or movement. "He's dead!" I despair each time, and each time my husband reminds me that this is what Lazarus is good at, that he will be fine. And each time my husband is right and when I come back an hour or so later, convinced that this time we'll have to dig a grave for him, he's vanished silently into the darkness.

The Cooper's hawk is another personaje in the unfolding nature drama of our back yard. I know when he's around because all the birds vanish as if on cue and the squirrels hunch down, trying to meld into the landscape so he can't find them. Most of the time he'll be perched on a nearby tree, surveying his territory with telescopic eyes but sometimes he actually perches on our deck. The first time I saw him land on the deck the "thump" he made when he dropped onto the wood railing sounded like he was made of stone. I tried to shoo him away, using the same strategy I apply so successfully with the starlings, but he only fixed me with his yellow serpent-like eyes and dared me to come outside and get him off the deck in person. The nerve, I thought.

One of our concerns when we moved a few years ago from the suburbs near a large farm area into this small city was that we'd leave so much of that wild life behind. We were quickly disavowed of such fears, I have to say.

And I don't miss living in the suburbs one iota. I certainly don't miss the idiotic hunters firing into our backyards each hunting season in their pursuit of deer or looking out onto my back yard one Sunday morning to see a large dead deer hanging from a hook in a neighbor's shed as his small grandchild ogled it. I sort of can understand how hunting for food can be a necessity, especially when a deer can feed a family for a year. But hunting for sport or pleasure is something else altogether. And they call us savages, I thought, as I saw the decapitated deer swaying in the breeze.

At least in the city you don't have to put up with such grisly views. Still, my city-girl fears of the wild wild don't do much for my husband who's something of a country boy born and bred. When we went on an anniversary trip to Montana a few years ago, he wanted to hike and I went happily along (well, as happy as I can be hiking) until I saw a large rather alarming sign notifying hikers that this was grizzly country. An encounter with one of the famed and gorgeous bears, the sign warned in oversize letters, was not an impossibility. I'm going no further, I informed my husband, who wanted to press on in the hopes that we'd at least get a glimpse of a mountain goat or a magnificent elk or something large and alive other than the greenery. Uh, uh, I said, shaking my head. I may not know when I'm going to die, but I sure as heck know how I'm not going to die and that's eaten by a grizzly bear for lunch.

I make no apologies. I'm a city girl, born and bred, and I much rather prefer the city wild (both animal and human) to the fake wild of the suburbs or the wild wild of the woods and jungles. The wild wild I'd much rather watch on the Discovery Channel.