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!

The human brain is a complex organ. There is still so much about this natural computer with its enormous capacity for data storage and retrieval that is a mystery to science. Obliquely, my story today is about a little-used function of the human brain stem.

Evolutionists believe the human brain stem represents the original brain possessed by our reptile-like ancestors millions of years ago. As such, it was not capable of very much thought, but it served to keep body functions like breathing and heart rate steady. It was also capable of conducting certain instinctual reactions to external stimuli – reactions like fright response.

Scientists today tell us that this thickening of the nervous tissues at the base of the human brain still serves these same functions. The brain stem tells the heart how fast to beat and maintains our breathing without our having to think about it.

 But what about instinctual behavior? Is it possible to react to fright without thinking about it? Can the brain stem, in response to certain strong, primitive stimuli, take command of our bodies and attempt to deal with a situation while bypassing conscious thought?  I’m here to tell you that it can.

For more nearly 40 years I have worked in a wildlife agency field office in one place or another. Members of the public are always bringing in injured critters for us to take care of. Sometimes they make ill-advised attempts to adopt wild animals and birds and make pets of them. Sooner or later, whether voluntarily surrendered or by confiscation, we end up in possession of them.

I first moved from a Maine fish hatchery to a regional fish and wildlife headquarters in 1974. During my first week there I learned an important lesson. Never open an unmarked box or sack without nudging it first to see if anything nudges back. The very angry great blue heron that narrowly missed my face when I opened a burlap sack left in the hallway taught me to be more careful.

On the other hand, curiosity can overcome even the most important lessons in life. I once returned from the field to find a hand-written sign taped to the bathroom door in the Brush, Colorado office that said, “CAUTION. LIVE BOBCAT. DO NOT ENTER.”

I, of course, just had to get a look at that bobcat. Who would have thought that a bobcat kitten can actually transform itself into an out-of-control electrical appliance? But, I digress….

One of the laboratory analytical processes that I performed years ago as the Maine State Fish Pathologist involved the screening of trout and salmon kidney tissues with a special microscope that used a black light to make treated pathogenic bacteria glow in the dark. I therefore had to black out the window in my small laboratory and spend several hours at a time working alone in a nearly pitch black room.

On such days I hung a sign on the door asking my colleagues to stay out. I usually cranked up the radio for company. 

One day in 1982 I was sitting in my darkened laboratory with my eyes in the microscope when I was aware that the door had opened for a second or two. That was not unusual. Frequently Bert, our mailman, slipped my mail in onto the end of the counter. I kept on working without looking up.

A minute later while buried in some sort of thought, I felt something gently press on the top of my right thigh. Keeping my eyes on the illuminated microscopic field, I absentmindedly reached down with my right hand to brush away whatever it was. Instead, my hand closed over a softball-sized furry head with stiff whiskers.

That’s when my reptilian brain stem high-jacked my body. It may be the closest thing I will ever have to an out-of-body experience. Completely beyond my conscious control, my body sprang back and took me through the narrow darkened room out into the bright hallway. From somewhere deep in my chest a most piteous deep roaring and howling burst forth, all entirely beyond my control.

After several seconds the noise subsided and I was able to shut off the autopilot and regain control. It was then that I began to hear the rib-splitting laughter of the fishery managers and game biologists that worked down the hall. When I switched on the overhead light in the lab, a 25-30 pound beaver balanced on its haunches with both paws on the seat of my chair staring at me as if it, too, thought the whole episode was hilariously funny.

It turned out that a couple had hand-reared a beaver kit until the living room furniture and the bedroom set came under peril. After making friends with the not-so-little guy, my buddies down the hall thought I might like to meet it, too. So, one opened the door while another shoved the beaver into my darkroom.

If anyone ever leaves off a live badger, or perhaps a mountain lion at the Brush DOW office, I will give serious thought to catching the next flight from DIA back to Augusta, Maine!

Let’s face it. Chickens are not smart. Inside that small, silly-looking head is a brain about the size of a garbanzo bean. That’s not much to work with. 

Still, insofar as a hen can cluck while at the same time walking from Point A to Point B, chickens are capable of rudimentary multitasking.

 Now, if you want to really cripple the intellectual abilities of a chicken’s brain, add about a half cup of testosterone. I grew up in the country. In my younger days I dressed out many a chicken. I can attest to the fact that a rooster’s gonads are many, many times the size of its brain. You know what that phenomenon does to the behavior of teenage boys. Just imagine its effects on a chicken! Whereas a normal chicken brain might broadcast the signal, “Worm ahead. Eat it.” – a testosterone-soaked rooster brain is more likely to consider whether to pick a fight with said worm or make love to it. 

Unfortunately, in the mental gymnastics of rooster thinking, there is inability to inject the concept of size or probability into the equation. To a rooster, a grizzly bear looks pretty much like a pigeon. It’s his job to run both of them off, then go receive thanks and maybe a little nik-nik from the pullets. 

As a 5-year-old, I am not sure whether I was physically intimidated by the alpha White Leghorn rooster in my Dad’s flock so much as I was creeped out by the blank, reptilian look in its eyes. Whether from a rooster or a snapping turtle or a playground bully or a politician, I’ve always gotten the willies from that look. At any rate, I had no desire to tangle with the white rooster. 

Since it was my job to feed and water the flock and collect the eggs, I needed a strategy to avoid confrontation. My mother always saved uneaten toast, bread heels, and salad scraps in a bowl for the chickens. I would take those out to the henhouse and toss them through the fence into the outdoor pen, then imitate the sound the rooster made when he was trying to impress the hens with his chivalry. The hens would pour out into the yard with the rooster right behind them. While they feasted, I’d slip into the henhouse and drop the gate to bar their return. 

Twenty odd years earlier my own father was not as fortunate. The tyrant rooster in his world was allowed to roam the grounds at will and thus was an ever-present threat. One day while walking through the main room of the barn old beady eyes ambushed the 5-year-old from a side entrance. There was no place for the boy to run except in circles all the time yelling for help with the big, fluffed-up rooster close on his heels in hot pursuit. 

As it happened, help was not long in coming. Dad’s 6-years-older brother, Bob, was tending the cows in the stanchions in a side room and could hear the commotion. The older boy arrived on-scene carrying a three-prong pitchfork. He waited for his younger brother to pass, and then flung the pitchfork at the big rooster. The long steel tines almost missed entirely, but one pierced the webbing between the base of one wing and the outer joint then stuck firmly in the gray boards of the barn wall pinning the indignant chicken so that its toes did not quite touch the floor. 

That is quite of lot of indignity for one rooster to suffer. But it paled to what came next. Before the pitchfork was pulled from the wall, the mop-headed little kid whom the big bird so enjoyed tormenting was allowed by the bigger human to get in a few retributive slaps and kicks while the big bird hung squawking helplessly. 

That rooster did not learn any permanent lesson. (There is only so much memory in half a dozen neurons.) Instead he became increasingly brazen, now attacking my grandmother as well as all three boys whenever their backs were turned. When my grandmother joined the chorus of lobbyists for the rooster’s demise, it probably meant the end was near anyway. But the old bird had yet to commit the ultimate blunder. 

Grampa Walker was a very large man for his time. He kept a watering trough filled beneath the barn during times when the brook ran dry in late summer. He came home one evening and filled two pails of water to carry down to the stock trough. Getting there involved crossing in front of the barn door, then descending a little hill and circling around to the open underside of the barn. 

My grandmother described how, as Grampa passed the big front door of the barn, the rooster’s head craned out from inside and watched the big man go by with hands full. As the bald head disappeared beneath the crest of the hill, the rooster’s hackles went erect and the bird lit out on his tail. 

Five minutes later Grampa came back up the hill into view. In one hand were the two empty pails. The other held the leg of a large, limp chicken carcass. The old bird finally went too far. The reign of terror was over.

When I was about 12 or 13, a family by the name of Kelly lived in the old Mills farm about a mile further up White Oak Hill from where I lived in southwestern Maine.  I used to mow their huge lawn and, when they were away, I took care of their pets and stock. One day at the beginning of a two-week period when the Kellys would be out of town, I carried a partial sack of laying mash into the chicken pen on the second floor of their huge barn. The flock consisted of about 30 black laying hens (brown eggs) and a single, enormous barred gray roosted with 2-inch long spurs that almost could have doubled for tent stakes.

 As I bent over the long wooden trough to spread out the feed, I completely dropped my guard. From behind I was rammed as if by one of the linemen on the Broncos’ offensive line. But that was nothing compared to the pain of the rooster’s spurs jabbing into both sides of one of my calves. I had been violated!

 Without pausing to think, I looked at the unfinished wall ahead of me. There, leaning between two studs as if deliberately set out for me, was a 30” piece of half-inch copper pipe. In a rage I grabbed the pipe, turned on the rooster, and swung for the fence. The giant rooster was laid out flopping on the floor, apparently in his death throes.

But I could not celebrate my successful revenge for even a millisecond. Icy fingers of reality gripped me instead. Okay, tough guy, now what are you going to do? You’ve just cruelly killed someone else’s rooster. How are you going to explain that? 

I avoided coming to terms with it for a little while by leaving the twitching carcass where it lay and going outside to mow the lawn. As I pushed the lawnmower around I first mentally beat myself up for giving in to my temper, then began to sort things out and make a plan.

 I could not commit the double sin of letting the huge chicken go to waste. I needed to dress it out and put it in the Kellys’ freezer. Then I would just have to face the music and confess my sins first to my folks, then to the Kelly family.

 I put the lawnmower away and went into the house (I had a key) and found a sharp knife and a couple of large plastic bags. I climbed the barn stairs and entered the hen pen to retrieve my victim.

 But he wasn’t there! Instead, sticking up from deep within the crowd of cowering hens along the back wall was a rooster’s head bent off to one side at about 45 degrees. On it’s neck was a baseball-sized hematoma. The eye on that side was swollen shut, but the rooster was conscious and semi-functional. It didn’t look like he was going to make it; but there was hope.

 Every day for the next two weeks the bulge on the rooster’s neck grew smaller. His swollen eye reopened after about a week and, by the time the Kelly family returned from their vacation, the old bird could nearly hold his head erect again.

 So, in a way, I got away with it. I never told anyone about the incident until many years later. But to this day, whenever I lose my temper – which is less and less as I get older, I remind myself of what I did to that poor rooster and what a senseless act a temper tantrum is.

            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.

(National Park Service photograph)

by Peter Walker

There is great irony in wildlife damage to Division of Wildlife property.  But it happens.

I arrived in Colorado from Maine the end of March, 1984 on the tail end of one of the snowiest winters in modern history. The agency I joined was near the end of a major operation to feed big game through the long months of deep snows that had driven stressed and starving deer and elk into mountain valleys in their desperate search for something to eat.

One of my first assignments as the new State Fish Pathologist was to conduct disease screening on the wild rainbow trout run in the Colorado River below Byer’s Canyon in Grand County. Coming from Maine, I had never been in the Rocky Mountains and had never seen an elk. My first trip over Berthoud Pass left me both literally and figuratively breathless.

I met Area Fishery Biologist Jake Bennett in Granby that evening. The next morning I was to meet Jake and other CDOW biologists and personnel at the Paul Gilbert Ranch, a Division property on the downstream side of Byer’s Canyon where we would launch the electrofishing raft and begin collecting the large spawning trout.

Driving through the narrow, vertically-walled canyon early the next morning, I had to slalom around the jagged rocks and boulders falling from high above as the accumulated snow and ice melted from the cliffs. Another new experience.

I pulled into the yard at the Gilbert Ranch just as the sun cleared the mountain to the east and lit up the landscape. Huge piles of snow, built up from a winter of plowing by a wildlife technician, restricted traffic in the yard. A long, mostly open, multi-compartmented pole shed rimmed one side while a sturdy barn and the large, two-story, original ranch house (now a CDOW Area Office) defined the other limits of the yard. The open bays of the pole shed were filled with stacked bags of grain and bales of hay, still being distributed to elk, deer, and antelope concentrations around North Park.

The yard was so crowded with free-ranging mule deer and elk that I had a hard time driving my truck between the unimpressed critters who were much more interested in mooching breakfast than getting out of the way. So these were the famous Rocky Mountain elk!

In the center of the yard was a stack of broken down hay bales on top of which stood a giant bull elk, still holding the previous year’s antlers. All of the lesser animals encircled the same hay pile. The old boy stood with his legs splayed and challenged every critter that dared step close. None of the animals showed the slightest fear or interest in me. I wondered if the old boy would charge me as well if I tried to drive him off the hay.

I was the first of the fishery crew to arrive that morning. Jake Bennett showed up a few minutes later; but it would be another half hour before the others were due to show up. Jake told me he had a large work boat stored in the one fully enclosed bay at the end of the pole shed and it had been months since he’d been able to check on it because of the snow drifts. We found a couple of shovels and began to dig out the door.

When the door was cleared, Jake found his key to the padlock and opened the swinging doors. A very large packrat – the most beautiful rodent I’d ever seen – was perched on the outboard on the back of the boat and quickly slipped off and out through a hole in the thin board wall in the back of the bay.

Then Jake let out a yell. “My boat! Look what he did!”

Over the course of the winter the packrat, properly called a brush-tailed woodrat, had laboriously toted corn and other grains from the storage piles in adjacent stalls through a hole in the wall and stashed the loot in Jake’s 18-foot fiberglass boat. By early April the industrious animal had filled the boat level to the gunwales. The enormous weight of several cubic yards of grain had bowed out the sides of the boat to the breaking point. The steel trailer was squashed down such that the axle gave in and was bowed to the ground with the two wheels splayed outward at the bottom at an angle of about 45 degrees. Imagine the labor that rat put into that project!

I went back to Fort Morgan that week as much charmed by one of Colorado’s native rodents as I had been by my first encounter with a bull elk.

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

Mother Nature was friendlier during my second week, giving me two full days of sunshine and a chance to do a little serious birding with my long-time mentor and friend, Don Mairs. We spent one of those days in the central Kennebec River Valley and the second in Sunkhaze Meadow National Wildlife Refuge. Between the two days we checked out both boreal and eastern deciduous habitats, lakes, marshes, rivers, and hayfields. One striking contrast between Maine’s wet northern habitats and high plains riparian woodland is the huge variety of nesting wood warblers. All warblers observed were in adult spring plumage, so the young were still in the nests at that time. Don’s excellent field speakers and I-Pod served us well in calling soras into camera range and pulling some of the more shy species into the open.

Birds:

Canada goose

Mallard

Wild turkey

Common loon

Pied-billed grebe

Double-crested cormorant

Great blue heron

Turkey vulture

Osprey

Bald eagle

Broad-winged hawk

Red-tailed hawk

American kestrel

Sora

Killdeer

Spotted sandpiper

Ring-billed gull

Black tern

Rock pigeon

Mourning dove

Chimney swift

Ruby-throated hummingbird

Belted kingfisher

Yellow-bellied sapsucker

Downy woodpecker

Hairy woodpecker

Northern flicker

Olive-sided flycatcher

Yellow-bellied flycatcher L

Alder flycatcher

Eastern phoebe

Great crested flycatcher

Eastern kingbird

Blue-headed vireo

Warbling vireo

Red-eyed vireo

Blue jay

American crow

Common raven

Purple martin

Tree swallow

Bank swallow

Cliff swallow

Barn swallow

Black-capped chickadee

Red-breasted nuthatch

White-breasted nuthatch

Eastern bluebird

Veery

Hermit thrush

American robin

Gray catbird

Northern mockingbird

Brown thrasher

European starling

Cedar waxwing

Nashville warbler

Northern parula

Chestnut-sided warbler

Yellow warbler

Magnolia warbler

Yellow-rumped warbler, myrtle race

Black-throated blue warbler

Black-throated green warbler

Pine warbler

Palm warbler, yellow race

Bay-breasted warbler

Blackpoll warbler

Black-and-white warbler

American redstart

Ovenbird

Common yellowthroat

Scarlet tanager

Chipping sparrow

Field sparrow

Savannah sparrow

Song sparrow

Swamp sparrow

Dark-eyed junco, slate-colored race

Northern cardinal

Rose-breasted grosbeak

Bobolink

Red-winged blackbird

Eastern meadowlark

Common grackle

Brown-headed cowbird

Baltimore oriole

Purple finch

American goldfinch

House sparrow

Mammals:

Beaver

Eastern chipmunk

Gray squirrel

House mouse

Red fox

Red squirrel

Whitetail deer

Herptiles:

American toad

Bullfrog

Common garter snake

Green frog

Wood frog

            “You aren’t going to believe this one,” said the young Maine game warden as he poured himself a cup of coffee in the office of the fish hatchery in northern Maine one late fall day.

            Of course that got our full attention and all craned his way to hear every juicy detail. Not much goes on a typical day in an outpost village on the edge of the boreal forest.

            The state salmon, trout, and char hatchery where I worked that fall lay nestled in the balsam fir forest just downhill from the little village of Enfield, Maine. The next township to the southeast, and the last partially settled area before the start of the vast corporate timber holdings of Diamond International and Georgia Pacific, was Passadumkeag. The name is Abnaki Indian, but the locals simply shorten it to  “Dunky.”

            That morning the game warden received a radio call from the State Police dispatcher that a party was requesting a game warden’s assistance at a residence in Passadumkeag. The wildlife officer was definitely not prepared for what he found.

            It seemed a young wife, 8 months pregnant, took advantage of the crisp sunny early November day to hang a load of washing on the clothesline behind her house. As she did so, something rather small and creepy feeling suddenly leaped onto her back at the base of her neck. In a sudden panic she reached back and tried to dislodge the object. It snarled and chattered back at her! She realized it was a small monkey! No matter how she tried, it would not get off.

            Sobbing and on the verge of total hysteria, the woman went into the kitchen, the monkey still riding on her back, and called the paper mill in Lincoln, some 25 miles to the north where her husband worked. She had him paged. When he answered she screamed out, “There’s a monkey on my back! Come help me!”

            The poor fellow must have assumed the stresses of pregnancy had pushed his bride over the edge. He jumped in his car and sped home not knowing what to expect, and certainly not taking the monkey comment literally. But when he pulled into the driveway, there she stood, sobbing incoherently while a tiny but extremely feisty monkey clung tenaciously to her back.

            For a few minutes the man tried to dislodge the monkey from its perch. But each time he approached, the monkey bared its fangs and very persuasively “told” him to back off. It was at that point that the call went out for a game warden. After all, who else would you call if your wife had a monkey on her back?

            By the time the young district warden pulled up, the monkey had been in possession of his “ride” for the greater portion of the morning. The very pregnant object of his/her affection was by now a whimpering basket case.

The warden first tried heavy leather gloves, the kind used to handle injured hawks and owls. But injured hawks and owls are much less agile than small monkeys plus they lack the ability to communicate their feelings the way we primates can. The game warden soon began to sympathize with the little animal. It was terrified and obviously desperate for solace. Nevertheless, he knew that he had to get the creature off quickly or he and the monkey might well be sharing midwife duties.

The warden tried a fish net, but the monkey had hands and could fend it off with great dexterity. Next he found a short board in the garage and used it as a long-handled pry. That did the trick. When the monkey realized it had no defense against the tactic, it made a mighty leap off the woman’s shoulder out onto the lawn and scurried for the dense evergreen timber at the edge of the cleared house lot. In a few seconds it disappeared into the tangle.

The woman recovered. She carried her baby to full term. The warden wrote what must have been one of the more unique incident reports in the history of the Maine Warden Service. As for the monkey, no one reported seeing it ever again. Maine winters are especially bitter in Enfield and Passadumkeag and there is little likelihood that a monkey could survive there unless perhaps it found a more willing back to ride. Its origin and its destiny will probably never be known.