by Peter Walker

It all started in October, 1983. A young mother moose and her very large and rambunctious calf took up residence near a high-end subdivision in the town of Manchester, about 12 miles from Augusta, Maine. At first their presence was a novelty for the homeowners. But when the moose started eating ornamental shrubs their stock dropped considerably. When they joined a flock of trick-or-treaters on someone’s doorstep on Halloween, the residents had finally had enough.

            At the time I was the fish pathologist for the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, working out of a small laboratory in the Belgrade Lakes Regional Headquarters near the State House in Augusta. Word came down from the head office across town that, when a call came from Manchester, we wardens, biologists, and technicians were to respond immediately to capture and remove the errant moose.

            The two moose, as if sensing the game had changed, became reclusive and unpredictable. We were called out 3 times in November only to be turned back because the miscreants had again disappeared.

Finally, the week before Christmas, the mother-daughter moose insurgents attempted another raid on the neighborhood and met with tragedy. They crossed the road in front of a speeding truck. The calf was struck and killed. The grief stricken young mother was standing nearby with her head held low.

The call to come get the remaining moose came in around 3 p.m. In that high latitude and on the far eastern edge of the Eastern Time Zone, there is very little daylight left at 3 p.m. on the shortest days of the year. We had to hurry. Two wildlife biologists, one technician, five game wardens, and a fish pathologist piled into three or four vehicles and struck off for Manchester.

The remaining moose was not hard to find. She stood outside the corner of a fence in a hay field about 150 yards off the road. With head held low and ears drooping, she certainly appeared to be in mourning.

Daylight was fast drawing to a close. Wildlife biologist Craig McLaughlin made a quick mental calculation. Figuring an average cow moose in that part of the world probably weigh at least 850 pounds, and knowing that there was only about half an hour of light to work in, Craig bumped the dosage of tranquilizer in the dart he loaded into his gun to speedily knock out the moose.

Next came the hard part: darting the moose. Ordinarily there would have been snow by now, but it had been a dry fall. Since there was no cover in the closely cropped hay field, McLaughlin, an experienced black bear researcher, simply walked up to the moose.

The horse-sized animal appeared not to notice the man’s presence until he was less than ten paces away.  Then suddenly its head came up, it erected its mane, laid its ears back and turned to face this pipsqueak who dared to approach. 

By comparison to the nearly black cow moose, Craig looked tiny and powerless. He nonetheless raised and cocked the modified shotgun and coolly stood his ground. A game warden standing beside me back on the road said with awe, “You’d never catch me doing that!”

For several long seconds there was a standoff. Craig needed a better target than the moose’s nose. The moose looked mean enough to squash him like a bug. Then an ear began to wiggle and switch positions. The moose was losing its nerve. Suddenly it whirled to run away and Craig fired the dart into its rump at nearly point blank range. The moose lumbered off toward the back of the field with the red and white dart sticking from its haunch.

It was obvious that the animal was going to make it to the woods beyond the field. If it made it back into the tangle, we might never get it back out. Instinctively I ran to head it off while Craig followed it from behind. The rest of my compatriots stayed put near the safety of their cars.

As I feared, before I could get close enough to be of assistance the moose disappeared into the dense trees with Craig McLaughlin not far behind it. Half a minute later I ran through the same opening on the woods’ edge to find that the ground suddenly dropped off about 30 feet into a brush-choked ravine. The moose stood at the bottom of the ravine. Craig had managed to outdistance it as the great animal began to feel the effect of the tranquilizer and now blocked it from progressing any further into the thicket.

By now the moose was no longer fiery-eyed and defiant.  The tranquilizer caused her to stagger with legs splayed and head sagging. With each breath she moaned a loud, pathetic, almost dog-like roar.

There was not time for discussion. We had to try to coax her back up the slope into the field or our mission would fail. Craig asked me, “Do you want the back or the front?”

“Lead the way. I’ve got the caboose!” I replied.

Craig grabbed one of the animal’s ears and began to lead it like a misbehaving child. The moose bellowed in protest but seemed powerless to resist. Meanwhile I first tried pulling on handfuls of coarse rump hair before finding I could do more good by simply whacking her on the butt and yelling, “Hee-yah, Moose!”

 At a trot the three of us noisily scaled the side of the ravine. As we reached the top the moose’s legs seemed to be turning to rubber and she staggered. “Don’t stop now!” Craig yelled.

The rest of our group was by now cautiously approaching the edge of the woods. It must have been quite a spectacle to see a moose with a human on both ends come bursting into the open in a screaming, bellowing tangle. Just as we re-entered the field the moose passed out and fell to the ground with a big plop. Craig and I stepped clear as the beast went down.

“If I hadn’t seen that with my own eyes, you could never convince me it happened,” said one of our incredulous onlookers.

It was nearly dark. Luckily our moose was very small as cow moose go. We later speculated that she had mated during her first fall. She probably weighed less than 500 pounds. It was a good thing as it turned out.

Had we been more prepared, we’d have brought a tractor with hydraulic bucket on a low bed trailer. Moose can be easily lifted onto the trailer by means of wide straps. But the only conveyance we possessed that evening was a yellow Chevy LUV compact pickup, the result of the sitting Director’s austerity campaign..

Gene Dumont, the other biologist in our midst, drove the little pickup across the frozen hay field and backed it up to the unconscious moose. The dinky trucks’ tailgate was lowered and eight men managed to slide the yearling cow moose on her knees up into the bed. Had it been a full-grown cow moose, her caboose would have protruded too far to secure it in the miniature truck bed. As it was, by lifting her great head up onto the cab, we were able to squeeze her forward enough to shut and chain the tailgate. A great bulge of moose rump hung over the top of the closed tailgate.

By now the moose was having trouble breathing because its relaxed tongue was in the way. Craig and Gene climbed into the truck bed and squeezed up behind the cab on either side. Standing, one held the moose’s head upright while the other held its enormous tongue out to one side to keep its airway clear.

Gene looked at me and said, “Get in and drive.”

“Where to?” I asked.

“I don’t care”, Gene replied, “As long as it is a long way from Manchester.”

As I eased the little truck across the frozen field I suddenly had an idea. The Chief Warden, John Marsh, had a back pasture in a very secluded area about 20 miles away. When we got to the road, I turned south.

So off we went through the countryside of central Maine on a crisp, clear December evening. I drove very slowly, mostly to spare my two companions from frostbite. As we passed through villages brightly lit with Christmas decorations, folks on the sidewalks would stop and stare slack-jawed as we passed.

It was a sight you just don’t see every day. The absurdly tiny, yellow pickup truck  was grossly overloaded with a kneeling moose whose head lay stretched out across the roof of the cab and its nose drooped down onto the center of the windshield. Two biologists lay stretched across the cab on either side attending to the moose. Meanwhile her more than ample moose rump with its stumpy tail bulged back over the top of the tailgate.

Half an hour later I turned into the driveway of Marsh’s Bog Hill Farm. As I drove past the house, I waved to John’s long suffering wife Judy as she stood in the doorway just shaking her head from side to side. She’d seen crazier things than that.

I proceeded right on through the open pasture gate and drove to the high side of the sloping pasture. It turned out that all we had to do to unload our “package” was to lower the tailgate and, with Craig and Gene holding on to her south end, drive slowly northward sliding her out onto the ground.

Craig by now realized that he had greatly overestimated the size of the moose and therefore had given it a very large overdose of the immobilizing drug. It was going to be hours before the moose would regain its mobility. Meanwhile he volunteered to sit with her lest she choke.

Gene decided to drive me back to Augusta before returning to assist Craig. As I closed the tailgate I spotted an aerosol can along the edge of the truck bed. It was a can of fluorescent red tree marking paint. In an instant I had a great idea! We could paint Merry Christmas on each side of the moose before it came to!

My two partners, both of whom had to deal with grumpy administrators and a discontented public on a daily basis, vetoed my idea. Thus one of the great artistic opportunities of a lifetime was lost. They wouldn’t even allow me to spray a tiny red spot on her nose.

Our moose did not regain full function until almost midnight. Somewhere in the Maine countryside that Christmas wandered what might have become a real live Rudolph….sort of.

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!”

The author's parents, Ted and Charlotte Walker, feed carrots to Mathew the Moose

by Peter G. Walker

Farmington, Maine is a college town that lies close to the northern edge of the settled coastal plain in hilly inland Maine. One fall day a few years back a wildlife tragedy occurred on the paved road running north out of Farmington. A cow moose made the fatal error of running into the road in front of an oncoming truck.

The accident might have gone almost unnoticed in Farmington. Moose are quite abundant and car-moose accidents happen from time to time. But this incident was different. Left behind cowering in the roadside bushes was a small bull calf. By fall, most Maine moose calves are the size of young horses and have learned enough survival skills to stand a reasonable chance of surviving their first winter without their mothers if necessary. The one orphaned that autumn day outside of Farmington was a late calf, the apparent result of a late estrous cycle by his young mom. Only a little larger than a Shetland pony, he did not have the training and experience needed to survive.

Bewildered and not yet having learned to fear humans, the little moose wandered into a nearby housing development and found the shrubs and leftovers in the gardens to his liking. In addition, he seemed to take some comfort in the human activity. Aside from a few barking dogs, no one threatened him. A few times a week the attention from children was especially lavish around the parking lot of the Latterday Saints Church at the edge of the woods.

As time went on and the humans became more used to the benign little moose calf, some began to approach him bearing gifts of carrots, apples, and cabbages. Good things to eat! These humans are here to take care of me!

Among the humans that accepted the young moose into their neighborhood were my brother, Tom, and his wife, Andii. Due to Andii’s landscaping and gardening talents, their back yard was particularly attractive to the gangly beast. In addition, their Lab-pointer cross accepted the moose the way any farm dog would accept a work horse. It was a safe place to hang out.

The weeks passed and the weather turned colder. The moose calf established a daily routine of hanging out at a neighbor’s house during the day, then returning to Tom and Andii’s in late afternoon to greet Tom when he came home from work and follow him around as he did his chores. If Tom went in the garage, the moose plodded along behind him to see what he was doing.

That particular moose was neither big enough or goofy looking enough to be a “Bullwinkle.” Andii began calling him Matthew and soon the name was accepted by the neighbors as well.

In November the weather turned cold. Moose are well suited for the lowest temperatures. Nevertheless leaving Matthew outdoors to huddle up against the foundation of the house in the lee of the wind didn’t seem right. Tom and Andii found that on the coldest days Mathew really preferred the shelter of their unheated garage.

Tom always closed and locked his garage and attached workshop at night. One evening when it was particularly raw Tom took a chance that Matthew would not be claustrophobic and left him in the garage when he locked up. The next morning the now half-grown moose was waiting patiently by the door into the house for some attention and some breakfast.

That is how my brother and sister-in-law came to host a moose in their garage through a long Maine winter. There was never a crisis; never an incident. One day Andii forgot to close the door into the garage and suddenly realized that Mathew had entered the house and was standing in her dining room! Not wanting the animal to panic and try to run through the glass patio doors, she gently turned him around and led him back into the garage.

But having a moose for a house guest is not something that can be kept secret. Eventually Matthew’s story leaked to the press and a curious public began to frequent the neighborhood to see the moose. Keeping a moose – or any wild animal – as a pet is no more legal in Maine than it is in Colorado. After a television news piece about Matthew aired on a Portland station in early spring, officers from the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife came to check out the story.

A couple of days later the gentle moose was gone. The Fish & Wildlife agency would only say that they had taken Mathew to a location where he could learn to fend for himself.

 Photo by Joe Lewendowski courtesy of Colorado Division of Wildlife

by Peter G. Walker

In order to put today’s tale in perspective, and to be fair to all concerned, I need to give you quite a bit of background. First of all, those of you who have never visited the little known region of eastern Colorado, you need to appreciate just how rural it is. Discounting Greeley, which is really an eastward extension of the Colorado Front Range, in an area the size of the entire state of Maine, there are only four “cities” that approach 10,000 people in size. The entire region has a phone book about the size of the one we used 30 years ago for the greater Augusta area in Maine. It’s about as rural as it gets. Mayberry RFD with cattle trucks and wheat fields.

About 45 miles northeast of my home town of Fort Morgan (population 10,000) is northeast Colorado’s other major city, Sterling (population also 10,000 if you count all the inmates in the local state prison). Except for yucky tap water, Sterling is a neat and almost always quiet town. After the 911 disaster, Congress, through the Homeland Security Act, made a lot of grant money available to even remote little towns like Sterling. In the years since 911, there have been several incredibly brutal and senseless slaughters in a couple of Colorado schools and at least one large church perpetrated by deranged students and citizens. Sterling’s government, while realistically not overly afraid of international terrorism, certainly has as much reason as any Colorado town to fear terrorism of the domestic sort. Therefore the remote little business and railroad yard community used its federal money to equip and train a SWAT team.

All of the northeastern counties in Colorado are shortgrass prairie. The only “forests” are widely spaced cottonwoods, peachleaf willows and introduced trees such as brown ash and Russian olive that grow along watercourses, few and far between. Colorado has plenty of black bears and mountain lions, but to have any chance at all of seeing  one you’d need to drive about 150 miles west from Sterling. Nevertheless, in every coffee shop and café in every village in this part of the state, you can easily find someone who, if not themselves personally, knows of someone who has seen a bear or a lion or a panther or who-knows-what in an alley or back behind Old Man Bender’s watermelon patch.

One searing hot summer day about 3 years ago, an employee at the Sterling Wal-Mart spotted a large black animal slipping stealthily into the willow and cattail thicket that grows in the bottom of a large intermittent drainage ditch leading from the back parking lot away from the store towards a housing development. She called Sterling P.D. and reported she’d just seen a bear. The Sterling Police Department activated their SWAT team.

During the melee that took place in the next few minutes with officers donning flack vests and military-style helmets and breaking out their AR-15 assault weapons, someone had the sense to call for a game warden. Veteran Wildlife Technician and Officer Mike Etl at the nearby Division of Wildlife shop at Dune Ridge took the call.

Mike arrived behind the Wal-Mart to find a group of officers huddled like musk oxen near the head of the ditch. To a Colorado Game Warden used to working alone with large animals and throngs of well-armed hunters, the SWAT officers, clad in black with abundant firepower and  body armor looked absolutely bizarre. Suppressing the repeated urge to burst out laughing, Mike gathered the very sparse facts available. He walked down into the ditch and immediately spotted a large, deep track with large claws. It was most assuredly canine and not ursine.

Recognizing the track, the game warden explained to the nervous men in black that it is not a crime to be a black bear in Sterling, Colorado or any other Colorado community for that matter. The intrepid wildlife officer then called for calm and told them all to wait while he went in to investigate.

There was a game trail of sorts through the narrow thicket. The ground became wetter as the ditch dropped progressively lower and finally, after a jungle-style stalk of about 200 yards, the warden caught up with his quarry. Sprawled in a green and slimy water hole was a very large, very hot Rottweiler.

Mike commanded the big dog  to come to him and the friendly beast came to heel just as he’d been asked.

“C’mon,” the game warden said. “I want to introduce you to some people.”

The goo-covered beast happily complied.

As Mike and his new friend got closer to the SWAT team, he called out, “Hold your fire! I’m bringing him out.” A few more steps and he could see the Sterling officers gripping their weapons cautiously and all trying to get a look at the black critter following Mike.

“Aw! It’s a big dog. Stand down!”

And that is what happened when the Sterling SWAT Team took on a bear.

USFWS photo by Peter Johnson, 2008

Oh, why does man pursue the smelt?
It has no valuable pelt,
It boasts of no escutcheon royal,
It yields no ivory or oil,
Its life is dull, its death is tame,
a fish as humble as its name.
Yet – take this salmon somewhere else;
And bring me half a dozen smelts!

Ogden Nash, 1902-1971

            I can’t explain it either. But ever since I was a little kid I’ve had a fascination with the smelt. And lots of other Mainers do, too.

            Middle Range Pond, the natural lake at the foot of the hill where I grew up in Poland Spring, Maine had a thriving population of tiny, sardine-sized smelts. They lived in the lake’s depths and were only seen in the early spring around ice-out when they ran up the little tributary brooks late at night to spawn. Men used to stay out all night to go smelting. They would catch the tiny fish with fine mesh dip nets. The limit was 4 quarts per fisherman per night. But, as I soon came to realize, smelts for most Maine outdoorsmen, are simply an excuse to stay out all night and howl at the moon and drink themselves into oblivion.

            When I was seven I got my first bicycle, a 24” Columbia, and shortly after discovered there was gold on the roadsides in the form of returnable bottles: 2¢ for a long-necked beer bottle, 3¢ for a 12-ounce pop bottle, and 5¢ for a quart pop or beer bottle.

            One of my first bicycle trips afield was down the hill to a 2-track woods road that led in to a cove where Schellinger’s Brook emptied into the lake. It was April, 1955 on one of the very first warm days of spring at that high latitude. I don’t remember why I chose that destination but, when I reached the edge of the brook, I knew I’d struck it rich. Every square inch of the rocks and fontinalis moss in the brook from the mouth up to the first falls was coated with tiny yellow-white smelt eggs in testimony of what had taken place the night before. Everywhere on either bank lay returnable beer bottles by the dozen! I was rich!

            It took me awhile to gather up all the good ones and stash them behind a brush pile lest someone else find them and steal them before I could get them all home. In the process I came upon a big dry cell flashlight, the kind with a handle and a red-flashing beacon on the back. Even in the second grade I knew that whoever left that nice light must have been smashed when he staggered back up out of the woods.

            I never really caught the smelt dipping bug. Once in awhile in high school I would go out with a few buddies and try to locate a run. Once I remember walking out on the end of an 8” x 8” cross piece on a logging road bridge. “Be careful of these beams,” I warned my friends. “Some of them may be rot….ten!”

            A second or two later the outer 4 feet of the beam and I both hit the shell ice and water ten feet below. My buddies said the only thing visible in their flashlight beams was my wool cap floating on the surface. I spent the rest of the evening stripped down and wrapped in a car blanket trying to trap the entire output of the car’s heater inside my blanket.

            Angling for smelts was a different story. The smelts in the lake spent most of their time near the bottom even in winter. My older friend at the base of the hill, Ronnie Morrill, had a fishing shack that his dad would put out in the middle of the lake every January. For two months Ronnie and I would fish in 60 feet of water for the occasional lake trout and all the smelts we could catch. To catch a 4-5” smelt at that depth takes a special rig. We used a 10-12” length of spring steel such as an old corset stay anchored to the wall of the shanty above a hole in the floor. To the end was attached a length of fine monofilament line – either 2 or 4 pound test – long enough to reach down to within a foot of the bottom of the lake. On the business end of that line was a small sinker and a #10 or #12 fly-tying hook baited with a tiny sliver of cut up baitfish.

            We usually each fished two smelt lines and set several tip-ups with live shiners or smelts for lake trout in proximity to the shanty. In those days an ice fisherman could have up to five lines.  The object was to watch the tips of the bowed springs closely. When a tiny smelt took the bait far below the spring wiggled slightly. One had to grab the line to set the hook, then haul it in hand over hand. It wasn’t an occupation that would keep a person fed. If we caught enough smelts in ten days afield, for one man to make a meal  I don’t remember when that was. But it was a great way to spend a bitterly cold winter’s day and it sure beat the heck out of Saturday cartoons.

            For some reason the Maine legislature has never looked upon ice fishing at night with favor. Middle Range, like most of the lakes in my county, was closed to fishing after dark. One day Ronnie and I discussed the state of affairs and decided there must be a good reason for it. We figured it must be a conservation measure. Smelts must be much easier to catch at night. Therefore we hatched a plan to test our hypothesis.

            The next weekend we took a small bag of night-fishing supplies out to the shack. As evening came on, we taped black paper across the three, single-pane windows and banked snow thickly around the base of the shack so that no light would be visible from shore. As nightful came on, we turned off the portable AM radio and placed tiny candles just above the smelt springs that gave just enough light to see the movement of the springs.

            Well, darned if it didn’t work spectacularly! Just about dark the springs began to wiggle and we caught smelts one after another about as fast as we could bait our hooks. In a couple of hours we easily caught more smelts than we’d caught collectively in the past 2-3 years! Around 9:30 p.m. we quietly locked up and walked the half mile across the lake to Ronnie’s house making as little noise as possible.

            Among the other ice anglers frequenting the lake in those days was my much older cousin Bobby Walker and his friend Bobby Martin. Bobby had a better-built shanty much closer to the landing on Route 26 than Ronnie’s little tarpaper-covered shack. The week after our successful smelt poaching operation we bragged about our success to the older boys.

            Thus on the following Saturday the two Bobbies came equipped with black paper, masking tape, and candles to give our technique a try. It worked just as well. The two high school seniors had a ball catching smelts through the evening. Perhaps if Bobby Walker’s giggle didn’t carry quite so far on a still winter’s night and perhaps if their shanty was another quarter of a mile off the highway, the game warden would never have become suspicious and walked out to see what was going on.

That’s how, at 9-years-old, I out-poached my cousin Bobbie.

Drawing by Wayne Lewis courtesy of Colorado Division of Wildlife.

by Peter Walker

            Three years ago my then 7-year-old grandson, Jason, introduced me to the recent hit animated movie “Over the Hedge.” One of the funniest scenes takes place in a tract home when the invading small animals are confronted by the woman of the house, armed with a broom.

            In the confusion the skunk turns to one of her compatriots and says, “I’m sorry you have to see this.”

Then she yells out, “FIRE IN THE HOLE!”

The view pans back away from the house as, “POOM!” a green cloud blows out simultaneously from the windows and doors.

That incident reminds me of a tale often told in the Walker family. My paternal grandfather, Elmer Walker, was a big man for his generation. At 6’ 3” he had a deep booming voice to match his stature.

My grandparents lived in a huge farmhouse in southern Maine that had been in our family since 1840. Typical of the homes of that era, the barn and house were attached by an enclosed shed to make chores possible without going out into the snow.

In more recent times the shed was finished off into a 2-story apartment. That apartment once served as a doctor’s office and at other times was rented to various people, including Nancy and me early in our marriage.

 The particular incident occurred in summer in the 1950s. At that time my Uncle Gerry and Aunt Claire were living in the apartment and saving to buy a house of their own.

Grampa owned a plumbing company. One of the responsibilities of the trade is making house calls at all hours of the night.

On that particular night, Grampa had been out fixing a water pump or unplugging a drain until after midnight. He returned dirty, tired and hungry to a darkened house and yard. The door to the main part of the house was on a low, open porch.

My grandmother had forgotten to leave the porch light on. Without a light Grampa fumbled through his ring of keys without success. As his frustration grew, the cat – or so he thought – squeezed between his ankles and the door.

At that point my temperamental grandfather took out his frustrations on the bothersome animal straddling his feet. Uttering, “Get out of here, cat!” he cuffed the critter off to one side with the side of his work boot.

FIRE IN THE HOLE!

Grampa caught the full retaliation of an offended skunk dead center in the sternum.

Those who have never experienced the wrath of a skunk at close range cannot appreciate how it overwhelms all the senses. Every nerve in one’s body fires off in panic. Your hearing; your eyesight; everything is temporarily paralyzed.

In that state of impaired thinking, Grampa headed for safety – sort of. Somewhere in his brain the urge to take shelter inside took over. Since he couldn’t find his key, he headed for the barn.

In the back of the barn, a hallway led to an unlocked door through my aunt and uncle’s apartment and on into the main part of the house. Aunt Claire said she and Gerry were watching TV in the sanctity of their darkened living room when their home was suddenly invaded by a bellowing, wounded beast preceeding an odor most foul.

By now my grandmother had been awakened. She met her howling husband at the door into the main kitchen and blocked his way. Instead she herded him back through Gerry and Claire’s apartment and into the barn from which he came, once again fumigating the already reeking quarters.

Once out in the yard, my 95-pound grandmother took control of the situation. She ordered the big man to strip off his ruined clothing while she connected the garden hose. The bellowing changed pitch but never let up as she directed a hard stream of ice-cold well water onto his naked frame and gradually took the edge off the skunk smell.

This was followed by several scrubbings with her homemade lye soap and still more icy rinses.

Needless to say no one in the house got a full night’s sleep and the after-effects of the event lingered on for weeks to come.

(Photograph courtesy of Colorado Division of Wildlife)

by Peter Walker

            I don’t know whether curiosity actually kills cats, but I do know what sort of trouble curiosity once brought to a red fox.

            A Maine Game Warden buddy of mine named Smally Chandler told me about the incident. Smally worked the Camden-Searsport district on the Maine coast during the early 1970s. In those days there was a great deal of night time deer poaching west of the Penobscot estuary and it kept the district wardens in that region very busy.

            Warden Chandler received a tip from a citizen about night hunters working a remote area in one corner of his district. Checking logging roads by daylight, he found tire tracks, empty rifle casings, and other evidence of possible night hunting in a clover-rich clearing at the far end of a long, one-lane dirt road through boreal spruce-fir forest. 

            There was no satisfactory place to hide a vehicle within sight of the clearing or anywhere along the woods road. Smally decided the only way he was going to catch the poachers was to go in and try to ambush the bad guys on foot.

So one clear October night with a full moon rising in the east, Warden Chandler hiked up the logging road with a pack on his back. The cloudless sky meant the temperature was going to plummet through the night until it was well below freezing by daybreak. He planned to stay reasonably warm on his stake-out. In his pack was a thermos of hot coffee and a tightly rolled sleeping bag.

The road had been used the year before to haul pulp wood from a fir stand that had been logged off. It crossed a long wooded swamp which would have been a problem if the logger had not built the road bed up a couple of feet with dirt from a barrow ditch along each side.

Warden Chandler set up his vigil by encasing himself in the sleeping bag in an inclined position with his feet toward the bottom of the ditch and his head on a “pillow” of grass and clover at the edge of the road. He was situated so that he had a clear view down the road for more than 200 yards in one direction and the clearing where poaching would presumably take place in the other.

Now came hours and hours of waiting. On this particular night the poachers never showed up. The game warden did his best to remain alert to sound, light, and movement along the silvery roadway while hunkering down in his sleeping bag.

Some time after midnight, with the full moon high overhead, Smally became aware of shadowy movement at the far end of the stretch of road that he lay beside. 

It was not human movement. It was a wild animal and not a particularly big one. As it worked its way closer, the warden could see that it was a red fox methodically checking the weeds first on one side of the road, then the other.

Lying absolutely motionless with only his head sticking out of the bag, the wildlife officer probably looked like nothing more than a log or a shapeless mound in the shadows. The crisp air was motionless.

Gradually the industrious little fox drew very close. Chandler hardly dared to breathe. As the fox checked the opposite road shoulder only 20 feet away, it suddenly lifted its ears and keyed on the man’s head. Perhaps it detected a subtle movement or a faint sound. What was this? Something good to eat?

On full alert the fox stealthily crossed the road toward Smally Chandler, moving cautiously on slender black legs. Closer it tiptoed…closer and closer. Chandler held his breath and the fox very nearly touched him on the nose with its muzzle.

At that moment the man blew air into the fox’s face with a sudden whoosh. The lightning reaction of the startled animal was to jump straight up. Warden Chandler said it appeared as if the animal suddenly levitated several feet, reversed direction in midair and disappeared into the brush across the road without ever coming down again!

            One day last summer Ouray noticed the family pack of weiner dogs were excited about something on the back lawn. Going to investigate, he spotted a gray and black object in the grass and it was moving. It was a baby bat. Assuming it had lost its mother, and knowing enough about bats to realize he probably shouldn’t handle it directly, the boy put on some heavy work gloves to capture the little bat and put him in a terrarium. He figured that the baby bat’s mother could access the baby through the open top and the little animal might be at least somewhat protected from cats and other small terrestrial predators.

The mother bat came close, but apparently was unable to maneuver into the terrarium. She got as close as she could and wouldn’t leave the tree branch above her baby.

So the next morning Ouray Ocanas Ouray placed the baby bat on a low branch. The mother bat went to it immediately. The first order of business was to feed the little one who had not eaten for almost 24 hours. The mother bat embraced her offspring affectionately as it suckled and seemed not to mind the proximity of the two humans. Once the babe was satisfied, the adult bat took it up into the foliage and disappeared.

The bats that Ouray Ocanas assisted were hoary bats, a large but little known species widely distributed in the New World, even in Hawaii. Full grown hoary bats are about 5½ inches long and beautifully marked with warm, reddish-brown faces outlined in black and silver-tipped body hair. Their wing membranes are black against flesh-colored limbs.

Hoary bats are migratory. They mate in fall, but females are able to delay implantation of their (usually two) eggs in the womb so as to time birth for mid-summer when large insects (moths, grasshoppers, and beetles) are most abundant. Females usually travel up into mid-latitudes to bear and rear their young while the males travel much further north and segregate from females through the summer.

Only a few hoary bats live in caves alongside other bat species. The majority live solitary lives in trees, either deciduous or coniferous. Daytime roosts are well concealed from above but open beneath to facilitate quick escape.

In Mammals of Colorado (1994. Denver Museum of Natural History), authors James P. Fitzgerald, Carron A. Meaney, and David M. Armstrong state that, until a female hoary bat with young was observed in Greeley, it was thought that this species only migrated through eastern Colorado and did not reside or raise young here.

Ouray Ocanas’ findings and Mandy Colburn’s photography are additional proof that hoary bats are part of the fauna of Colorado’s eastern plains.

Thanks, Mandy and Ouray, for sharing your experience with estesbog.com.

What would you get if you crossed a lark sparrow with a meadowlark? Whatever it might be, it would probably look quite a lot like a dickcissel. Dickcissels were this week’s stars in northeast Colorado. This sparrow-sized bird with a big voice has puzzled taxonomists for years. The species apparently evolved to take advantage of temporary weed patches left in the wake of the enormous herds of wandering bison. As the plains ecosystem was altered by man, dickcissels adapted. They have a strong affinity for alfalfa fields. But they remain more or less nomadic, here one year and totally absent the next five or ten. July, 2009 marked the largest incursion of dickcissels in this part of the Great Plains since at least the 1970s. The males can be found on power lines overlooking alfalfa or shrubby habitats. They have at least two loud songs, both manifestations of “dickcissel” – one buzzy and one clearly whistled.

The week’s nature list is as follows:

Birds:

Canada goose

Wood duck

Gadwall

Mallard

Blue-winged teal

Redhead

Wild turkey, Rio Grande subspecies

Northern bobwhite

Pied-billed grebe

American white pelican

Double-crested cormorant

American bittern

Great blue heron

Turkey vulture

Mississippi kite

Swainson’s hawk

Red-tailed hawk

Ferruginous hawk

Northern harrier

American kestrel

American coot

Killdeer

Greater yellowlegs

Spotted sandpiper

Baird’s sandpiper

Wilson’s snipe

Ring-billed gull

Rock pigeon

Eurasian collared-dove

Mourning dove

Barn owl

Burrowing owl

Common nighthawk

Chimney swift

Belted kingfisher

Red-headed woodpecker

Downy woodpecker

Northern flicker

Western wood-pewee

Western kingbird

Eastern kingbird

Say’s phoebe

Loggerhead shrike

Warbling vireo

Blue jay

Bank swallow

Northern rough-winged swallow

Cliff swallow

Barn swallow

Black-capped chickadee

House wren

American robin

Northern mockingbird

Brown thrasher

European starling

Yellow warbler

Common yellowthroat

Spotted towhee

Cassin’s sparrow

Brewer’s sparrow

Lark sparrow

Lark bunting

Grasshopper sparrow

Blue grosbeak

Dickcissel

Red-winged blackbird

Yellow-headed blackbird

Western meadowlark

Common grackle

Great-tailed grackle

Brown-headed cowbird

Bullock’s oriole

House finch

American goldfinch

House sparrow

Mammals:

Eastern cottontail

Fox squirrel

Pronghorn

Whitetail deer

Herptiles:

Bullfrog

Lesser earless lizard

Northern leopard frog

Plains blackhead snake

Western rattlesnake

Woodhouse’s toad

I returned from two weeks in soggy Maine to find that things are still as wet here on the prairie as they have been since April. The plains are as green and lush as they have ever been in July in my 25 years here. A few fall migrants (sage thrasher, solitary sandpiper, greater yellowlegs) and post-breeding dispersal species (snowy egret) are beginning to show up. A trip to Poudre River State Fish Hatchery on a diagnostics call gave me a few mountain species to spice up my week list. My best bird this week was an adult Mississippi kite here in Fort Morgan. I’ve seen them here fairly consistently since the early 1990s and I suspect the species is trying to expand northwestward. I’ve only seen a nest here in Morgan County once in a huge cottonwood near the train station.

Birds:

Canada goose

Mallard

Redhead

Cinnamon teal

Green-winged teal

Pied-billed grebe

American white pelican

Double-crested cormorant

American bittern

Great blue heron

Snowy egret

Turkey vulture

Mississippi kite

Swainson’s hawk

Red-tailed hawk

Ferruginous hawk

Northern harrier

American kestrel

American coot

Killdeer

Solitary sandpiper

Greater yellowlegs

Wilson’s snipe

Ring-billed gull

Rock pigeon

Eurasian collared-dove

Mourning dove

Common nighthawk

Chimney swift

Broad-tailed hummingbird

Belted kingfisher

Red-headed woodpecker

Northern flicker

Cordilleran flycatcher

Say’s phoebe

Western kingbird

Eastern kingbird

Loggerhead shrike

Blue jay

Black-billed magpie

American crow

Common raven

Horned lark

Tree swallow

Northern rough-winged swallow

Bank swallow

Cliff swallow

Barn swallow

Mountain chickadee

American robin

Northern mockingbird

Sage thrasher

European starling

Cedar waxwing

Yellow warbler

Common yellowthroat

Brewer’s sparrow

Lark sparrow

Lark bunting

Grasshopper sparrow

Red-winged blackbird

Yellow-headed blackbird

Western meadowlark

Brewer’s blackbird

Common grackle

Brown-headed cowbird

Bullock’s oriole

House finch

American goldfinch

House sparrow

Mammals:

Black-tailed jackrabbit

Black-tailed prairie dog

Eastern cottontail

Golden-mantled ground squirrel

Pronghorn

Spotted ground squirrel

Wyoming ground squirrel