The Wildlife Battles

Most nights the ringtails are in the rafters, skunks under the porch, raccoons own the east side of the front porch and the foxes own everything surrounding the lodge. That's the way it is. Everybody has their own place and it keeps the peace, between different types of critters anyway. Raccoons always fight among themselves, always.

Each night I go through two bowls of Kit&Kaboodle on the porch and one in Kobae's pen which is about half a bag. When morning comes all the bowls are empty. However the last two nights there are a pair of green eyes sitting on a rock just this side of the Base Camp hogans, all night. It's a cat. Either the bobcat I saw a couple days ago or a mountain lion. Whatever it is, it has discouraged everyone from coming to eat on the porch. When morning comes all the bowls are empty. Here's what they have looked like the last two mornings.

The songbirds, house finch, white-crowned sparrows, dark-eyed juncos, mourning doves, Eurasian-Collared doves, and red-winged blackbirds with five or six other types that show up occasionally have been under constant attack by one of three predators. The butcher, Loggerhead Shrike, small enough to get in the bushes with the songbirds and snatch them. A small sharp-shinned hawk, probably male that makes lightning quick strikes into the feeding area coming in low over the horizon and a larger, medium size sharp-shinned hawk, probably female who flies right above the bush the songbirds are hiding in, comes crashing down on the bush trying to get them to run. I've taken to feeding the songbirds right next to the tallest and thickest bushes and looked around at the landscape nursery to see if there was anything I could buy that would I could plant this time of year that would help provide cover.

If I don't see any songbirds at the feeding areas then I know one of them is here. The small sharp-shinned and the butcher fly off as soon as I open the door. The medium size sharp-shinned does not. She stares at me and talks to me. She seems pretty frustrated. I've been kind of enjoying our conversations. Her behavior the last few days of looking in the windows and fighting the one window on the back porch where she sees her reflection is pretty unusual but who knows how things work in the hawk kingdom.

On Monday I'm gathering up stuff to go to town and when I walk onto the back porch where the female always looks at herself in the window I find this.

She's dead, and recently. I look at the windows anywhere near to where the body is and there are no signs that she hit any of them. Besides she knows better. She spends a lot of time on the back porch. She was the last decent size hawk that I've seen out here as the ravens have killed all the others. I look for wounds on the body and there aren't any and her neck isn't broken like she hit a window. She's still warm and it's a cold day. She has just died in the last few minutes.

I take her around to the front porch where there's more sunlight. Ever since I read that 60% of raccoons die in the first year from starvation I decided nobody starves on my watch. It's been an expensive promise. I feel her ribs and stomach, they seem empty. I'd never thought about the predators starvation. I walk back around to the back porch and there are several poops she has left there the last few days so I don't think starvation was it.

Did she die wearing herself out fighting the reflection? I don't think so I think she had come to realize it was her since the last two times I saw here she was just looking in the window reflection while perched on the back of a chair.

I pick her up to look her in the eyes to see if she will tell me how she died. I think she did.

When I moved here I found several dead house finches that had theirs eyes swollen, almost sewed shut or in a couple cases popping out of their heads. Reading up I found they normally got it from their water or food source. So i put out water bowls and keep the water fresh in them and change it out frequently and it pretty much went away. Sometimes it crosses over the other finches but it's primarily a house finch seeing eye disease and you can look it up using just those words.

I've never heard of a predator getting it but clearly they do eat house finches. Whatever the cause she only had one eye functioning so something was going on inside. She is settled now in the wildlife  graveyard that Linny and I constructed with our friends and enemies, the Cemetery of Frienamies.