Wild in the Garden

For many of us, even on an island, it’s in our yard or garden where we have our most frequent encounters with wildness, often in unexpected and perhaps not so welcome ways – a brown snake aroused from its afternoon nap on a sun-baked rock, a mole defying myriad traps and devices to get at the lettuce. Happily, my critter experiences are not limited to the garden but they often occur while I’m there.  

Few are the summer days when I’m not accompanied by the high-pitched kew, kew, kew of nearby Heart Island’s ospreys. Give me an osprey hovering off shore with its promise of a swift, wing-tucked plunge into the Bay and I’ll drop my spade and take a ringside seat. In early June, I’m frequently halted as Papa osprey, clasping another dead fish, makes countless trips to the nest and long before he’s in sight, nursery-bound Mama punctuates the air with her persistent cries. Early last summer, after a storm apparently damaged their nest, they both donned their tool belts and for an entire day hauled nestward, as though in blue heron disguise, long branches trailing behind them. Once again I was reminded that here were birds not so different from their Ice Age ancestors who flew above mammoths and, based on fossil evidence, winged above our own Cro-Magnon ancestry.

Among the birds here, there is, well, a pecking order. At the pinnacle, presumably, are bald eagles. But that doesn’t keep the irreverent crows from kicking up a ruckus each time an eagle visits the neighborhood. One cool morning, as I pruned at an especially early hour so as not to agitate the bees still snoozing on wands of liatris, a suddenly riotous battalion of crows were joined by an osprey in full high-cheeping battle cry. With an astonishing display of teamwork, they repeatedly dove at a bald eagle nearly hidden in a nearby spruce. Theirs was such an aggressive if undignified assault that the osprey, intent on striking close, snagged several feathers in the branches before successfully driving away the eagle, its only defense an occasional flap of wings, a few weak and meager cheeps. Hardly the nobility you’d expect from the Kingpin raptor nearly twice the size of the osprey and which, simply on the hunt for a leisurely breakfast, had perched with royal air among the rowdy, bullying masses.

In recent years, my garden’s unanticipated drama has usually involved a family of fox. Somewhere close, probably in the softer, washed away portion of the neighboring bluff where trees roots are exposed and hollows have formed, a vixen has kept a den. Last year, she birthed five kits, a lively bunch – or skulk  as the field books instruct – that made for a nearly summer-long adventure. As the kits grew from tawny, plush-toy-look-alike fluffballs into leaner, red creatures with black stockings and narrow, white as-though-just-dipped-into-a-saucer-of-milk muzzles, their world expanded. Neither recognizing peripheries nor respecting borders, they soon transformed parts of our yard into a vulpine playground. No doubt practicing for tougher tasks ahead, but in what was hard not to call a game, they chased each other around our oak, and with abrupt, frequent changes in directions, they tackled, tussled, tagged, darted off, and, after fanning out into the adjoining woods, poked their heads from behind tall ferns in some foxy version of hide-and-seek. One afternoon, from my desk, I watched as a kit leaped with all fours off the ground and repeatedly pounced on a hapless (and very dead) vole, as though the purpose wasn’t so much to rustle up some lunch as to entertain – that kit the unlikely embodiment defying my mother’s long ago reprimand: “Don’t play with your food.” As mere spectator, and although I was glimpsing the stealthy, crafty critter the kit was becoming in a world where rules are neither nice nor neat, I had no choice but to pity vole, applaud vulpine.

For weeks, I gave out special dispensation to the fox family in spite of the bloody, tattered remains of mallard, rabbit and squirrel routinely left in the garden or just steps from my door. But when a surprising number of beheaded, gutted crows started showing up, I scanned the trees, worried my noisy but welcome neighbors were being wiped out. I now have a keener appreciation for the dive-bombing, screeching commotion crows create each time a fox is anywhere near.

Mankind’s gardens have long revealed human nature’s wish to possess and control, in spite of season-after-season evidence that this is an ability we’ll never achieve, old news even if delivered in some new packaging of thrip or gold canker, or delivered, perhaps, by Asiatic long horn beetles and other messengers new to the terrain. But all uninvited visitors are not unwelcome in my garden. I hold the door open to rabbits, for example, now that I get my lettuce from Friday morning’s farmers’ market, and what we’ve come to let pass as lawn is a crazy quilt patched with sorrel, dandelion, hawkeed, wild yarrow and, a bunny’s favorite, red clover. I’m even willing to share my land with deer, but can’t they please merely cruise by my lilies and phlox? Likewise, I welcome the fox kit who one morning high-stepped into the monkshood, nosed behind the veronicastrum, muzzled past the hydrangeas and ducked under the deck. A few minutes later it scuttled out, head held high, nose pointing skyward, and balanced between its picket teeth something still quite alive – an apparently delicious-to-the-fox- palate (who knew?) spotted salamander.

Later, it was impossible to find any traces where the fox had been. Just the faintest depression of dirt around the coreopsis, a bent coneflower stem, a bit of bee balm pushed aside. Nothing chewed, sheared or mown down. Less damage certainly than I wrought, attempting not to squash the campanula as, after, I squatted to peer beneath the deck.

Fact is, fox, deer or rabbit are all expertly familiar with this land’s physicality – though the hands-down winner for the most intimate-in-the-body-knowing of topography has to be the snake, no? Imagine how we humans would know the land differently if we had to get down on our bellies to travel over rock or through duff. Or, on hands and knees, lower face to food rather than, with the miracles of hands and thumbs, lift bowl or fork to mouth.  

Our fellow non-human island inhabitants know the land in ways even islanders long ago born here do not, are familiar with this landscape in ways we humans with our conscious competence can only poorly imitate. No matter how light and sure-footed I attempt to walk in the woods, I often blunder, my passage intrusive, noisy. Even if for stretches of time I sit cross-legged and admirably still in the grassy, hummocky clearing in the woods, I’m never as intimate with the grass and hollows the way the deer that bed down there are, as evidenced by the flattened grasses in the most sensitive, protected places. My wild neighbors respond to the seasons and tidal rhythms with consistencies I will never fully understand. Yet, as poet Mary Oliver wrote: “We live in the same country…our burning comes from the same lamp.”

Crow and osprey, rabbit and fox. These, along with jay, flicker, white-tailed deer, brown snake and red admiral, a host of warblers and songbirds, and out on the water, the cormorants and loons, the later arriving scoters and buffleheads, an occasional passing seal or porpoise I’m poised with binoculars to spot whenever a white-foamed boil and froth tells me mackerel are running – all are my wild neighbors. Fellow inhabitants without roof or door or address, and who, to my garden and my settled life, bring a bit of wildness, a touch of welcome disorder.

We homo sapiens may be the “wheel that drives our world.” But it’s a shared world. A place that does not require ownership, and where, often, neither borders nor deeds are recognized. No matter how much I may tinker in it, my garden is, after all, only for a time, mine.