ESTESBOG

by Peter Walker

            We humans attribute grace and beauty to many wild creatures. But the fact is, even Nature’s prettiest animals sometimes have bad days.

Case in point:

When I was a young fishery biologist in Maine’s central coastal region, I had a bright and personable student assistant one summer named Bobbie Potter. One morning as we drove out Route 3 east of Augusta on our way to a lake, Bobbie recounted his experiences the evening before taking photographs of a herd of grazing deer.

            “I think the whitetail deer is the most graceful animal there is,” Bobbie said sincerely.

            Just as that sentence came from his lips, a whitetail deer suddenly bounded up the steep banking off the right shoulder of the highway just ahead and made a high, arcing leap over the guardrail onto the road. She muffed the landing.

With legs spread to the four points of the compass, the “most graceful animal in the world” did a spectacular belly flop and slammed spread eagle onto the pavement. Even her neck and chin smacked the ground.

            I braked to a stop as we watched the dazed critter struggle to its feet. It seemed to call roll of all its body parts before walking, not running, across the road and down the other shoulder.

            Bobbie was speechless. Either that or he couldn’t fit a word in edgewise through my cackling laughter.

            Even birds wipe out every now and then. Does anyone remember the footage in the early Walt Disney nature movie, The Vanishing Prairie, where the mallards crash land in slow motion on glare ice to the dubbed-in sounds of a bowling alley?

            When my son Corey was going to college at the University of Southern Colorado in Pueblo, the two of us went for a walk one evening during the last hour of daylight along the nature trail near the Pueblo Zoo. We were passing through a grove of tall cottonwoods when several turkey vultures began to descend on the tree tops to roost for the night.

            As the first one settled into the tree right beside us, I pointed it out to Corey and asked the rhetorical question, “Aren’t they graceful?”

            No sooner had those words left my mouth than the dry branch the great black bird selected to land on gave way. The eagle-sized bird dropped three feet onto another branch below. But it failed to grasp the second branch and rolled off, wings flailing without coordination, and fell about 6 feet to the next branch. By now it was upside down; so it bounced off that branch, too. And so it went, zigzagging and thudding from one branch to the next like a ball bearing in a pinball machine.

By sheer chance the vulture landed on it belly in line with the last and biggest limb about ten feet off the ground and finally managed to get a hold. It struggled to its feet, carefully folded its wings and shook out the dents. It was only then that it noticed us humans standing there watching the performance. It hung its bright red head as if in embarrassment and averted its gaze.

“Yup, Dad. Those birds sure are graceful!”