A Summer Summary

 September 12, 2008

Ruth describes some of the wildlife in her yard. .

I said to Don, “We’re having a silent summer.”

I was exaggerating, yet something was definitely missing. We hadn’t had a silent spring; there was the usual amorous and territorial racket of birds and frogs, with occasional chipping from chipmunks. This chipping sound is part of our background noise and always makes us smile, especially when a front-yard chipmunk proclaims loudly the granite doorstep as his own sunning spot. But when summer progressed, the chipping ceased.

Last summer, too, our chipmunks disappeared, but we thought we knew what had happened, because it was obvious that some villainous creature had dug down into the front-yard chipmunk tunnels. We’d seen a weasel at the edge of the woods. We figured there had been a weasel massacre of chipmunks; the weasel or weasels had killed not only the front-yard family but also all the other chipmunks who never reappeared under the bird feeder or at the stone under the lilac bush where we always leave some seeds. Last year when friends of ours returned to their home after several days away, they discovered that a weasel had got in, wreaking havoc, and they deduced that he was the reason their chipmunks had also disappeared that summer.

This spring we waited, hoping to see some survivors or some newcomers who had discovered our bird feeder (which we call MacDougalls’ Golden Arches). And what joy when I spotted one at last! I rushed to tell Don, saying, “It’s the sole survivor, the Lone Ranger!” A few others appeared. But then they all vanished, and this year there weren’t any clues such as a dug-up tunnel or a weasel sighting.

We asked friends and they said that their chipmunks were scarce and also red squirrels and gray squirrels. But in Connecticut, friend Gloria Pond reported that “We have them, fat, stripy, shopping for the groceries of 2023 by our calculation.” So was it a New Hampshire phenomenon? Did the 155-plus inches of snow we got last winter have anything to do with it? Or all the rain? I asked Google, but I mainly was given directions to “Alvin and the Chipmunks.”

The beavers were scarce in our ponds this summer too. We have expected they would be moving on, because they’ve eaten themselves out of house and home here. Apparently, though, there’s enough food left to sustain a few, hooray! They might be living in a refurbished old lodge in the connecting pond, out of sight, to which they’ve moved occasionally over the years, or maybe they’ve built a new unseen lodge.

We missed the constant sight and sound of the beavers and relished what we got. We occasionally glimpsed one swimming past the overgrown abandoned lodge to check the main dam. When we read on the porch in the evening, once in a while we’d hear the slap of a tail on the water or the grated-carrot sound of munching on a branch. One day I looked out my upstairs office window and saw a beaver grazing on the strip of lawn between the pond and the garden. As I watched, out of the long grasses beside the pond came a baby beaver, and then another. They explored while she ate. We’ve seen beavers eating the succulent stuff at the edge of what we call Cress Cove, but this was the first time we’d ever seen a beaver eating grass. We saw her once again another day, and then no more. I hope she found a better source of food; it seems like grass would be impossible to store for winter. I think of her and the babies every time I mow that part of the lawn; in that strip, mowing wasn’t really necessary for some time because she had mowed it so thoroughly.

If we didn’t have as many chipmunks and beavers as usual, we did have bears.

The first bear to enter our yard was the biggest we’d ever seen, such a magnificent sight that we just stood rooted at the window, forgetting to run for the camera. (Well, since Don is recuperating from two knee replacements, I was the one who should have done the running. Together we kept forgetting throughout the summer.) Eventually we recovered our wits and made enough of a commotion so the bear tramped off. (The second story I wrote at age six was called “The Big Bear,” and I was proud of that “tramp” verb. This certainly was the bear of my imagination, so I might as well use the verb again.)

Next in June came Mama Bear and two cubs. She was a young mother, and the cubs were roly-poly. We stood enchanted on the porch, then at last shouted and clapped. All three ran up a tree beside the shed. But evidently cubs’ claws aren’t long enough to hang on for any length of time, because first one cub and then the other slid right back down. So Mama descended and herded them off into the woods.

One day when I was working in my office I heard Don yelling and rushed down to discover him out the porch door, on the back step, brandishing his cane, swearing at a bear who was trying to approach the bird feeder. It wasn’t that Big Bear but it looked formidable.

I said, “For God’s sake, don’t tackle him, let him have the feeder!”

Don continued yelling. I ran into the kitchen and fetched my parents’ large brass dinner bell with which my mother used to call my father down from the north forty for meals in their farming days. My wild clanging did make the bear back off toward the woods, but it wasn’t a full retreat. Nevertheless, Don headed out to grab the feeder off the pole, while I screamed at him to let me do it, I can move faster. Men! Stubborn! He did move fast enough to get back onto the porch with the feeder, and soon the bear gave up and returned to the woods.

The last bear adventure of this summer occurred in mid-July one evening after supper when I stepped blithely off the porch to take the compost bucket to the compost pile and met, coming toward me around the corner of the house, what appeared to be the same bear, the dinner-bell bear. Our reactions were identical. We both screeched to a halt and froze. For a stunned split-second we stared at each other. Then we both spun around and fled, me into the house, the bear thundering into the woods. Needless to say, the compost bucket did not get emptied that night.

We admitted defeat, as we usually do in midsummer, and stopped putting the bird feeder out, just as the experts tell us to.

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Late in August, Don saw a chipmunk at the stone under the lilac. He reported this headline news to me, and we rejoiced. I’ve seen the chipmunk too now, but we haven’t yet heard him chipping. Nobody to warn off?

Posted: September 12 2008 at 10:15 PM