The Wild West Suburbs

It was an eerie sound. My husband heard it through our closed den window. "That's not a dog," he said. I went to the door and opened it in time to hear a small bit. It was a coyote, howling at that night's full moon. 

A coyote? In a western suburb of New York City? We figured it was singing in the vicinity of our town's community garden and woods beyond the backyards of the homes across our street.

"Coyote (Canis latrans)" by Joshua Tree National Park is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0.

(Well, maybe it's not so unusual considering coyotes have frequently been seen in the heart of New York City's Central Park and a pair have lived there for years.)

I have seen and heard some interesting things in my suburban town over the years, especially during the years when I'd be walking the streets at 5 a.m. to make a very early train. I've seen and heard owls - screech, great horned, barred, perhaps even a barn owl. I've seen foxes sitting in the middle of an intersection as I approached or trotting down the street.

I've seen raccoons the size of small dogs crossing what would otherwise be a busy street, heading from one backyard to another. I've also seen raccoons popping out of the sewer at the end of my property.

I've sidestepped skunks, including two baby skunks I barely saw. I've had to stop as a herd of 12 deer galloped across the road ahead of me.

And there was the bear I saw after it damaged the house feeder - and ripped off the pole arm - on a sunny late afternoon in October when there were plenty of people outside their homes. And there was the bear that damaged another feeder and the one that damaged my pear tree.

But a coyote howling at the moon? This was a first.

Like a lot of animals, coyotes, members of the dog family like your pet Bowser, have always been around in New Jersey and other eastern states, where some called them "brush wolves." Unlike wolves, coyotes don't hunt in packs. According to the International Fund for Animal Welfare, a coyote's diet "consists primarily of mammals, such as deer and rabbits, but may also include frogs, fish, and other prey, as well as fruits, grass, insects, and carrion."

"fox" by digitalprimate is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

"Mammals" such as pet cats and dogs are also eaten, which is why some towns go berserk when a coyote is spotted. Usually they won't attack - the one time I saw one it quickly skittered away. But some will. 

As for "carrion," I suspect overflowing garbage cans would attract a coyote the way they do skunks, raccoons, bears and crows, among others.

According to a group called Project Coyote, the United States Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services accounts for over 64,000 of the hundreds of thousands of coyotes killed each year through hunting bounties, poisoning and hunting, among other ways of death. Despite that, coyotes are not an endangered species. They’re classified as least concern with increasing populations.

If you provide coyotes with an increase in suburban garbage and deer, you'll see more coyotes. It's a wonder I've never heard one here in the neighborhood before.

I've seen a lot of changes in my suburb. When we moved in over 30 years ago you could often see rabbits and red squirrels. I once inadvertently uncovered, then quickly re-covered, a nest of baby bunnies under one of my shrubs. Rabbits used to eat my plants and occasionally would get behind the deer netting. Now I see rabbits only in wide-open areas, such as the Central Park of Morris County. I see more foxes there, too, as well as on my street and sometimes crossing my yard.

The red squirrels I would see were on one street where there was a large white pine. Between the larger and more numerous gray squirrels and the homeowner cutting down the pine the red squirrels disappeared. But they can easily be found in dense pine forests.

Another animal seen more often in the NJ suburbs,
including my backyard. (RE Berg-Andersson)

My point is the area has changed. More houses, less open land and trees. No hunting except at specified times and locations. The growth of suburbia has promoted the increase in deer and other animals as well as in the predators that eat them. The growth of suburban man-made garbage promotes an increase in animals, like bear, that have found rifling through a garbage can is an easy meal. So there are more human encounters with wild animals.

As encounters go I'd rather hear a coyote singing to the moon.

Return to Life and My Stand Against the Disposable Society

Every spring, when the worst of the cold is over and the snow has finally melted, I am amazed at what survives in my garden and saddened by what does not.

Despite neglect or doing something wrong out of ignorance, the perennials come back and I am both humbled and thankful.

The same is true for house plants. When I accept a house plant as a gift from a friend or rescue a plant someone has cruelly ripped from a planter and then thrown on the sidewalk - the bulk of my house plants are one or the other - I have to think long and hard about where to put it so it can get the most (or the least) amount of light. I have to hope the plant doesn't mind being watered only once a week or that in winter there will be a lot of dry heat and not a lot of moisture.

One of those plants is an orchid I thought I had killed because I uprooted it when it didn't have to be uprooted, cut back what I later realized was a lot of its root system and then fed it at the wrong time. Somehow that plant has survived, and this year is the second straight it will flower.

Last week, I wrote about the mistreatment of my peppers and my cannas. The cannas saddened me in particular because I knew better. I knew that if you took a tropical plant and put it on a porch where it can get down to the single digits overnight, it is not going to be happy. What I didn't realize was putting a plastic sheet or two and a blanket over the pot would keep in moisture on a plant that was supposed to be allowed to dry out.

I moved the pots indoors, into a sunny part of the one room where I can place all my house plants, and hoped for the best.

Two of the five pieces of growing canna, April 2016 (Margo D. Beller)

Well, when I wrote about them last week I thought they were dead. And then one evening I looked into one of the pots and saw two signs of life! Two little bits of green poking out of the pot, which was solidly packed with roots and corms. A few days later, I pulled the pots onto a tarp on my enclosed porch and started poking around -- which meant dumping the solid clump from the pot, using a saw to cut into it and then a spade to pull the sections apart.

I found five growing pieces of canna. I had planned to divide what was in the pot this spring anyway and so filled the pot with soil and put in the five pieces so they would have plenty of room to stretch out and grow. Cannas can get pretty big and after a few years they grow into each other to create a solid mass.

I looked very carefully at what I turned out of the other pot but saw nothing growing.

Now, it is always possible there will be growth in what I'm composting. My keeping it in the deep freeze might've put the plant into a deeper hybernation than I realized. If that is the case, when I put it all in the compost pile I won't be surprised if I see a mass of large, green canna leaves growing, which I can then either pull up and plant elsewhere or leave alone, a kind of zombie canna graveyard.

Why do I mention all this?

First, because I am relieved I am not a plant killer.  Second, because once again, Nature will take care of itself if Man (or me) doesn't mess around with it.

Most times people buy plants, keep them for a while and then throw them in the trash. This is a waste of your money, the plant grower's time and the compostable material in the plant.

When I take care of my plants, when I keep them going far beyond what the label says (and that includes "annuals" I've kept going for years), I am taking my stand against being part of a disposable society that doesn't think twice about putting in the garbage furniture, bicycles, plants or other things that can be donated to others for repair and resale or gifting.

My front room is full of life, and it is another thing that gives me a reason to live.

Geese on the Grass (Alas)

To paraphrase Paul Simon, the other day it was my birthday and I hung one more year on the line.

I got up that morning and went outside before getting ready for work. Two cardinals were battling it out musically. The songs signify “this is my territory” to other males and “I can sing louder and longer and be a better provider” to females. These songs should not be sung in mid-February but with this year’s unusual weather all bets are off.

Just before going inside I heard the honking of Canada geese. A small flock was taking off from the small stream behind my neighbors across the street on the county Greystone property.

How most people see Canada geese.

These were local geese, and they were heading someplace close such as one of the town ponds or the elementary school ballfield. They'd be back at dusk, like commuters.

We've all seen the long Vs of migratory geese heading north in spring and south before winter. Many times geese will fly south from the tundra to a lake in upstate New York or New Jersey, only to have to move on after that water freezes. You can tell they are migrants because the flock is very large and very high in the sky.

The local geese, despite being in New Jersey for generations, also get restless, that instinct that says “we must move” during migration times and “we must find more food” during the winter not quite extinguished.

All Canada geese look the same so when huge flocks gather in parks or office lawns, one can’t shoot them because they are protected by federal law. Some companies use dogs to scare the geese away, pushing the problem to another office park, or silhouettes of men or dogs on the lawns, the suburban equivalent of a scarecrow that works about as well when the geese realize nothing is moving.

Geese like short grass so they can see predators coming, making manicured lawns or decorative ponds perfect habitats.

There was a lot of screaming in New York City when scores of Canada geese were captured on a pond in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park and killed. As they do with the rampant deer herds, these people seem to have a romantic notion of "nature" and prefer blaming mankind and leaving the creatures alone or controlling their numbers with “birth control.” For geese, that means finding a nest, somehow getting the parents away from it (no easy task - a well-aimed swat of a wing can break your arm and geese also bite) and shaking the eggs to keep them from forming chicks (thus the parents sit on eggs that never hatch).

There aren’t enough people in the world to do this, and that doesn’t get rid of the geese already around, eating the grass and leaving behind long, green, cigarette-shaped souvenirs. And then there's always next year.

I am for balance, and more than agree it was man  - with his unchecked expansion into hundreds of acres of woods to create suburban sprawl - who created this problem. But  leaving hundreds of Canada geese to flock on - and mess up - hiking trails, business “campuses” and “office parks” is extremely unbalanced, not to mention a health hazard.

In the Bergen County, N.J., town where I work the neighboring company did nothing to discourage the four geese hanging around its fake pond, cropping the lawn and leaving their droppings on the grass. Geese mate for life and have large families.The population grew and the lawn service worked around them. When summer ended and the lawn service put its mowers away for the season, the undisturbed geese had no reason to leave. In fact, others joined them. Sometimes they wander onto my employer's property. It hasn't helped there's been no snow for force them to leave.

 

There are more geese behind me and to the left that you can't see in my picture.

I enjoyed walking the paths between that office and mine, but the picture shows why that has ended. When the geese finished cropping the grass near the pond they moved on. They crossed the footpaths and driveways, leaving their many calling cards. What used to be a long, pleasurable hike became an obstacle course. If I wasn’t shooing 35 geese out of my way I was stepping carefully around droppings everywhere, including bordering public sidewalks. I now stick to the concrete parking lots.

I do not understand why this company and others that go to a lot of expensive trouble to keep the lawns mowed, fed and watered in summer allow geese to literally make a big mess everywhere when the weather gets cold. Maybe it's because no executives walk on the paths, or those employees who do figure the crap literally comes with the territory. Maybe no one wants to be known as anti-goose.

Maybe they shouldn't have sought a perfectly manicured lawn in the first place.

Geese are out of control in recreational parks and fields, too, which means a lot of people are walking or playing in goose droppings. Worse, some people believe it is their civic duty to feed the geese, which only encourages them to stay and make more of a mess.

Canada geese are not the only pests, of course. The populations of a lot of creatures have exploded thanks to man's incursion into what had been untouched lands, usually at the detriment of other species. The deer herd is huge in my area, for instance. In other areas of the country alligators are showing up in people's pools or coyotes snatch little dogs out of backyards. Bears are killing chickens or breaking into homes and bird feeders or feeding from Dumpsters. Skunks and racoons have also discovered people are rather sloppy when it comes their garbage.

Don’t get me wrong, I do like Canada geese. Seeing wave after wave fly in at dusk over the only unfrozen water of Schwartzwood Lake one winter a few years ago was thrilling. Watching a very long skein of geese way up and calling as they fly in migration always stops me in my tracks.

But those are migrants and the others are local pests. As my husband likes to say, in the suburbs we call our rats deer and our pigeons Canada geese.

We created this situation. There aren't enough natural predators to make a dent in this population. We must do something to put nature back in balance, even if that means rounding the geese up and “harvesting“ (oh, the euphemisms!) the meat for homeless shelters. Alot of people are as emotionally - sometimes dangerously - against hunting geese, as they are against hunting deer or bear. But I see no other way around the issue.

In the meantime, watch where you walk.