Bobcat Days of Summer

Taking Time to Let Nature Surprise

This morning, Baldy came by to visit.

He’s just one of the many new friends we’ve met this summer while spending the morning coffee hour at the Chaparral Institute’s bird deck. Alternating between reading the morning paper* and looking up to observe the surrounding activity, Nature never fails to surprise.

Poor Baldy. He was fine all spring. Then the kids came. We’re not sure if the stress of fatherhood was the cause, but our boy eventually started losing his head feathers. However, sporting his new Turkey Vulture persona, Baldy is just as frisky as Spotted Towhees always are. As far as we can tell, his mate and the two kids haven’t said a word about his dearth of plumage.

Speaking of speaking, although communication is mostly an intraspecific thing, sometimes two different species have words with each other when tempers flare. While enjoying breakfast, Jumpin’ Fun, our brush rabbit, finally had enough of Caracalla, our pushy Mourning Dove. We don’t speak rabbit, but clearly the conversation was intense.

Having been reprimanded enough, Caracalla retreated to what he thinks is his feeding platform, occasionally glaring back down in a huff at his furry competitor. The House Finches? He tolerated them most likely because they apparently know their place in the avian pecking order.

Nearby, guarding his sugary feeder hanging at the deck, Napoleon, our territorial Allen’s Hummingbird, surveyed his terrain. Any interloping hummer who dared to take a sip of the sweet nectar was immediately attacked with rapid fire chirps, dive bombing maneuvers, then finally being dispatched with a high speed chase until the offending party disappeared into the sky.

The Eurasian Collared-Dove showed up again as it had most of last week. Much larger than any of our residents, including Caracalla, everyone scattered when this bulldozer landed. Easily filling nearly half of the feeding platform, this invading beast had no interest in sharing.

Our restored chaparral habitat is also a place of surprise during crepuscular times. A couple months ago were visited by one of the chaparral’s most beautiful creatures, the Ceanothus silk moth. As fellow lepidopterist Akito Kawahara wrote in today’s Washington Post, “I am here to tell you that moths are woefully underappreciated, despite their importance to the environment. Their sheer numbers only begin to speak to their relevance: One in 10 described species of organisms on Earth is a moth, and a recent study from the University of Sussex in Britain showed that moths are more efficient pollinators than bees.”

Helping to keep all the lower trophic levels in balance, we were lucky enough to have a mama bobcat raise her three kittens nearby. Needless to say, when she and her kittens wandered through our patch of chaparral, the bird life made quite the racket. And Jumpin’ Fun was no where to be seen.

*On a final note, in consultation with Cooper, the Chaparral Institute’s Chief Spiritual Officer, we finally decided we’d had enough of the Los Angeles Times and its descent into catastrophizing nearly every story, becoming more and more like a grocery store tabloid. So, we cancelled our subscription after being loyal fans for nearly fifty years.

Cooper still needed something to fetch in the morning, however, so he convinced us to give the New York Times a try. It’s been a welcome relief, and the paper arrives an hour earlier than the LA Times ever did.

Interestingly, the very first week we were enjoying our new subscription, the NY Times ran a contrasting article about the snow pack in the Sierra Nevada that the LA Times had portrayed as a pending disaster, with nearly daily articles about how the state was about to be flooded at any moment. In bold, threatening headlines, the perfectly natural event was demonized as “The Big Melt.” We wrote about this unfortunate turn of events at the LA Times back in May.

The New York Times approach? “California’s Snow is Melting and it’s a Beautiful Thing.”