Author: Neil A. Case

There’s one house finch on the thistle seed feeder outside the window in front of my desk and a cardinal on a branch of the tree nearest the platform feeder but there are no birds on that feeder. There was a goldfinch on that feeder a few minutes . . . 

Robins make nests from grass and sometimes a strip of cloth or a piece of string. They line the inside with mud, molded by the female to the shape of her breast. They locate their nests on horizontal branches of trees and on window ledges and other . . . 

“Turtle,” I said to my daughter when I saw one in the road ahead. My daughter, who was driving, had seen it too and was slowing the car as I spoke. There were no other cars on the road so my daughter stopped the car a few feet from the turtle and . . . 

“I just love to hear robins sing. When I hear robins sing, I know spring is here,” a neighbor told me recently.

Our American robin, as suggested in the book Birds of America, is perhaps the most common bird in North America. Certainly it’s one . . . 

There’s a bird house on the trunk of a tree near our back door, a screech owl bird house. My son-in-law made it and put it there for me after I saw what I thought were screech owl droppings on the ground near the tree. Maybe they were screech owl . . . 

I looked out the dining room window one morning and was astounded at the sparrows; house sparrows. They covered the ground, as numerous as dead leaves in the fall. They lined every branch of the bush near the window. They crowded the bird feeder.

I . . . 

One wintry morning a few days ago, a day when the sky was gray and snowy, blown by a strong cold wind, I went driving on a country road, hoping to see some wildlife activity, an uncommon bird, or maybe a mammal that should have been holed up for the . . . 

A river runs through my home town, and there was a bridge across the river when I was a boy, just a block and a half from my home. I often walked to that bridge, after Mom and Dad decided I was old enough to roam alone, then walked up river.

The . . . 

Our new neighbors haven’t made much sign yet, just a few cut saplings, no dam, no lodge, no hole in a bank. There’s no stream, therefore no bank to dig a hole in.

Settlers coming to North America found beavers from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from Mexico north, wherever there were deciduous trees. Beavers do not eat coniferous trees.

Early settlers were familiar with beavers. There were beavers across Europe and Asia, a different species though very similar to the beavers of Europe.

A beaver is a larger animal than many people think. An adult has a body up to two and a half feet long and a tail as much as another foot and a half long. It weighs sixty to eighty pounds. Its head and body are covered with thick, dark brown fur. Beaver skin was prized for men’s hats and were trapped extensively in America for their skins. They were also trapped because of the damage they did to streams, forests and farm land. They damned streams creating lakes and marshes. Their damns blocked water flow and boat traffic. Beavers cut trees and when the trees around their homes were reduced they dug ditches, then cut and floated logs to their homes.

A beaver’s home, a house they build of sticks and mud or dig in a bank, is a cavern, four to seven feet across and about a foot and a half high. Whether it’s in a house or tunneled in a bank, the entrance is always under water and the living space above. There are two entrances, a tunnel large enough for two beavers to pass and a second much more narrow tunnel used to escape a mink or other water predator.

A beaver’s front teeth are strong and sharp and they wear but wear slowly, and they never stop growing. They’re the chisels a beaver needs to cut trees, even large trees, as much as three and a half feet across at the base of the trunk, I read.

Other features of a beaver is large, broad, webbed hind feet, their paddles, and a broad, flat tail covered with scales, not fur. That tail, once thought to be used to carry mud to build a dam or house, is a rudder and a warning device. When a beaver sees or senses danger it slaps the water with its tail, making a loud splat, a warning to other beavers in the area, then it dives.

Beavers do not hibernate. In areas where ice covers water in winter, they store food for the season. They cut logs six, eight, ten feet long, drag them to water and float them to their lodges where they weight the logs with mud and stones, stacking them under water for winter dining.

Trapped for their skins, killed to prevent dam building and land flooding, and cutting trees, beavers are now extinct in Great Britain and some other countries. They are rare over the rest of their range, including most of North America.

Opinions are changing, however. Many people now consider beavers beneficial. Their dams slow water flow. The lakes and marshes they create hold the water on the land. Cutting trees permits more trees and other plants to sprout and grow. They’re even live-trapped, then released in areas where there are none.

Now, in America, beavers are permitted to spread, as our new furry neighbors have.

The animal was about the size of a cat or small dog. It was black with white on the back of its head and in a line along each side of its back. It had a bushy tail which it held up in an arc. It was a skunk of course, a striped skunk.

One of our dogs had gotten too close to a skunk in the yard once. It was weeks and many baths before we got the skunk smell off that dog.

The smell, the stink, is the feature skunks are famous for. It comes from two scent glands at the base of the tail. Those glands produce the horrific smelling fluid which skunks spray. To spray, however, a skunk has to have its tail held high above its back. Grab a skunk by its tail, pick it up and with its head hanging down it can’t spray, so I’ve been told by a friend. I’ve never tried it however, and I don’t intend to.

Striped skunks are largely North American animals. Their range is from coast to coast in North America, Canada and northern Mexico. There was a time when they must have been common. Thousands were trapped for their fur which was made into women’s coats. The fur was dyed so it was all black and called Alaskan sable.

Skunks are most often active at night. But they do sometimes go foraging during the day. As a boy I occasionally saw one during the day in woodlands and in grassy fields. I saw one in an Indiana Park in mid-afternoon a few years ago. But skunks have become uncommon. Now, for me, it has become a thrill to see one. In recent years when I see a skunk it’s usually dead, lying in or along the side of a road.

Skunks are omnivorous. They eat insects, particularly grasshoppers, mice, eggs, small birds, grubs and carrion. They eat berries, other fruit and carrion. From the number of insects and mice they eat they would seem to be beneficial. But try to convince a farmer with chickens that skunks are beneficial. Though skunks don’t eat chickens, or so it’s reported, they do kill them and they seems to relish chicken eggs.

A skunk’s home is a hole in the ground, often a hole made by woodchucks, or a hollow log and stump. Skunks don’t hibernate although they do become inactive and their heart rate and temperature drop during severe winter weather. When the temperature warms enough for snow to melt, even just a little bit, skunks will be out making tracks in the snow.

Skunks mate in late winter and early spring and their young are born in summer. They’re blind when born but when their eyes open they can walk and follow their mother, single file, learning to forage.

Skunks make interesting pets. They’re quite passive and can be petted, even cuddled. The scent glands can be removed but that isn’t necessary. I’ve petted a skunk that still had its scent glands. But I was apprehensive. I’m content to just see a skunk, in a woods or field or walking across my yard.

There is much to write about the blue jay beginning with the way people feel about it. Many people dislike the blue jay. James Audubon may have fostered the dislike by bird watchers. Audubon’s painting of the blue jay is of one feeding on the eggs in the nest of another bird.

Blue jays are aggressive birds. They drive other birds away from feeders which also makes them unpopular with birders. Perhaps the jay at my feeder that day had driven other birds away.

Many farmers and gardeners don’t like blue jays either. Jays feed on ripening corn and when a flock of jays lands in a field of ripening corn they do considerable damage. Farmers frequently call them maize thieves.

Blue jays peck at apples on the trees and sometimes do as much damage in orchards as they do in corn fields. They eat berries, blue berries, raspberries, strawberries, almost any kind of berry.

Hunters don’t like blue jays. They claim, and there are observations that seem to prove this, that when a jay sees a man with a gun in a woods the jay screams an alarm, alerting and warning all the other animals within hearing. Amazingly, go for a walk in a woods without a gun, however, as I do often, and the jays make no alarm. Its as if they can tell the difference between a man with a gun and a man without, me, carrying a pair of binoculars.

I’ve read that blue jays have the thieving habits of a crow. And why not? They belong to the same family of birds as the crow. In one of my bird books the author describes blue jays as the noisiest and most obstreperous creatures in the woods. However another author calls them amusing rascals.

There’s another side to blue jays however, a plus side. Every adult jay, male and female has a bright blue crest, blue on the back of the head and blue spotted with black and white on its back, wings and tail. They’re gray on the throat, breast and belly and have a black neckless but the gray doesn’t detract from the blue. Blue jays are pretty birds.The most common call of a blue jay is a loud cry, often repeated over and over and usually described as thief thief thief. But blue jays have many vocalizations and thus enliven things for a bird watcher. They have bell-like notes, a clicking call and something that sound like teakle teakle teakle. They imitate other birds, the calls of red-shouldered hawks, black-capped chickadees, American goldfinches, eastern wood pewees, northern orioles and gray catbirds.

Blue jays also plant trees. They eat acorns and hazel nuts and, like squirrels, they bury nuts for future dining. Again, like squirrels, they don’t retrieve all the nuts they bury and some of those nuts grow.

Blue jays eat insects, grasshoppers, beetles, tent caterpillars and many more. They kill and eat mice. The eat snails and small fish, frogs and salamanders. They eat spiders. They are common feeder birds and for me, the blue jay is a good subject, particularly when there are no other birds.

I’ve heard hunters claim crows recognize a man with a gun and call in alarm, warning other crows and animals. I believe it. I’ve never had crows call in alarm when I’ve been walking in a woods armed only with binoculars. But hearing crows calling in alarm I have hurried toward the sound and found crows circling over, diving at a great horned owl.

I’ve been told by ice fishermen that they have watched a crow go to the hole they had cut, draw in their line and take a fish off the hook.

Crows are protected now but may be killed during a prescribed season each year. For many years, however, crows could be killed at any time and in any way. They were shot. They were poisoned, not with sprays but by putting strychnine in the eyes of animal carcasses. Crows feed on carrion and they eat the eyes in a carcass first.

Crows were even dynamited. Sticks of dynamite was tied to branches of trees that crows roosted in, connected, then detonated after the crows had gone to roost. In this way thousands were killed at once.

Crows build their nests high in tall trees. Male and female work together though the female does the most. The male often brings his mate food as she shapes the nest of sticks. The female also does most of the incubating.

In addition to sticks and a grass lining, a crow’s nest may have decorations, coins and other shiny things that the birds have collected. In one nest, I read, there was a lady’s watch.

Crows are clever birds. Some people have claimed they are intelligent, even that they are the smartest of birds. They drop clams on rocks along sea shores to break open the shells. I read of a pet crow that was allowed to fly free and met a boy coming home from school every afternoon. In another account, a crow followed a milk delivery man and pried the tops off bottles of milk left on front steps, then drank of the cream that had risen to the top.

Crows can mimic other birds and pet crows have been taught to say things such as: Hello, So long, You betcha and Hot dog. Splitting the tongue of a crow is a superstition. It does not increase their ability to speak. Another superstition is that crows are symbols of death, that a crow landing on the roof of a house foretells a death in the house. This superstition is believed to have come from seeing crows gathering and feeding on the dead on a battlefield.

Crows need some positive press. They are actually beneficial. Corn makes up no more than twenty percent of their diet and only when the corn is in a certain stage. Crows also eat grasshoppers, gypsy moths, cutworms, tent-caterpillars, angleworms, beetles, locusts, millipedes, grubs, crickets and spiders. They kill and eat field mice and young rabbits. They eat small snakes, frogs and shellfish.

I heard a crow call one morning recently. I was out in our barn and after I heard it. I thought, I haven’t heard a crow, or seen one, in weeks. Months maybe? I have noticed and written about the decline of many birds but I hadn’t noticed the disappearance of crows. It was a case of out of sight, out of mind. Since then I’ve been watching particularly for crows and haven’t seen or heard another.

It was early morning, the sky was clear and the sun was just above the horizon, a bright golden ball in the eastern sky. I’d seen the sun from the bathroom window which is on the opposite side of the house from my study. The hawk was facing east and its breast looked as bright as the sun.

The red-shouldered hawk is a buteo, a hawk with broad wings, like the more common red-tailed hawk. It’s the shape of a red-tailed hawk but smaller, a couple inches shorter. It’s brown on the back and wings like a red-tail, except the upper sides of the bends of its wings which are red spotted with black. It’s also red, a lighter red, on the throat and upper breast, shading into still lighter red, then yellow on its lower abdomen. Its head is yellowish-brown, its tail is banded black and white.

According to Russell E. Mumford and Charles E. Keller in Birds of Indiana, “The red-shouldered hawk once was more abundant than the red-tailed hawk in much of Indiana, but there has been a drastic decrease in its numbers since 1900. This once common bird in Indiana is now a rare to very rare summer and winter resident.

The red-shouldered hawk’s range is southeastern Canada and northeastern U.S. west into Minnesota, south throughout Florida and west into eastern Oklahoma and Texas. That includes the eastern half of Iowa, the state where I was born and grew up. But I lived in northwest Iowa and never saw a red-shouldered hawk there.

Decline in number is one reason red-shouldered hawks are seldom seen. Habitat is another. Red-tailed hawks are birds of open fields, open woodlands and woodland edges. Red-shouldered hawks are birds of mature forests and forest edges. They often perch in a tall tree at the edge of a woods, fly out and down to catch field mice and other little critters they spot on the ground in the adjacent open land, then fly back to the trees. The one I saw a few days ago was perched in a tree at the edge of a woodland. Red-tailed hawks, when hunting, often perch in the open on power poles and power lines.

Red-shouldered and red-tailed hawks both build their nests in trees. Both build platforms of sticks high up in trees. But red-shoulders build in trees in mature forests, red-shoulders in open woodlands. That’s another reason for the decline of red-shouldered hawks, loss of nesting habitat by forest cutting.

Red-shoulders and red-tailed, marsh, rough-legged, Coopers and sharp-shinned, have all been called hen hawks and chicken hawks. Individual hawks do occasionally kill and eat a chicken.

Red-shouldered and red-tailed hawks prey primarily on small rodents, which makes them, according to one account I read, “far more beneficial than harmful, even if they do kill a chicken now and then.”

Red-shouldered hawks kill and eat almost any critter they can catch. In addition to mice and shrews they kill crayfish, fish, earthworms, large insects, snakes and small birds. Which makes me wonder, was the red-shouldered hawk I saw perched in the tree across the road plotting preparing to swoop down on a bird at my bird feeder?

I think not since I haven’t seen it since that morning a few days ago. It was a morning of bright sunshine, rare in itself this year, and a rare bird.

Christmas wasn’t the only time of bird hunting. It was a year-round activity with men making a living killing passenger pigeons for food and others hunting birds just for their feathers which were used to decorate women’s hats.

There were no animal protection laws then, no bag limits, no protected species. But a growing number of people enjoyed seeing birds and many of them were becoming concerned about the decrease of birds due, it seemed, to hunting. Many species of birds were becoming scarce, particularly birds with long white or brightly colored feathers. Among the birds declining was the passenger pigeon, once the most numerous bird in the world, which would soon become extinct.

Concern for birds was a major factor in formation of local chapters, then the National Audubon Society whose members campaigned for bird protection laws. Another factor was the Christmas bird count instead of a Christmas bird hunt. This was first proposed and written by the editor of an early bird magazine, Dr. Frank Chapman. The magazine was titled Bird-Lore.

The first Christmas bird count, as proposed by Dr. Chapman, was held on Christmas day, 1900. Twenty-seven birders of twelve states and two Canadian provinces participated and sent lists of birds seen and counted to Bird-Lore Magazine.

There were no rules for the early Christmas bird counts. The first rule prescribed was that participants had to spend a minimum of two hours in the field. That was increased to four hours, then to eight. Now it’s recommended, though not required, that observers spend up to 24 hours starting and ending at midnight.

The count no longer has to be on Christmas day but must be on Christmas or within a specified number of days before or after Christmas. The area of a count is to be circular and up to fifteen miles in diameter. Cover within the area is to be described, i.e., 20% woodland, 40% harvested grain fields, scrub, lake, river, etc. Weather is also to be described including temperature, cloud cover, rain or snow and wind direction and force.

The Christmas hunt of the 1800s has been replaced by the Christmas bird count. It has become a Christmas tradition in the United States and Canada and in other nations as well. And where there were twenty-seven birders on the first Christmas bird count in 1900, now millions of birders participate and thousands of reports are submitted each year.

Christmas bird counts were proposed to reduce the killing of birds which they did in the early years. Now there are laws, particularly the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1916, which protect birds.

Second, Christmas bird counts were, and are, a form of outdoor recreation. They give people who participate exercise and relieve the stress of modern life. They get participants back to nature, and ecotherapy studies have shown that contact with nature is good for us.

Third, records from Christmas bird counts are a font of information. While not a census, they are a comparison of samples of bird numbers and distribution for over one hundred years. Song birds, for example, robins and bluebirds and goldfinches and most other little birds of the U.S. and Canada have declined by approximately forty percent. At the same time, cardinals and tufted titmice and Carolina wrens and others have extended their ranges north.

And now, the weather data from Christmas bird count reports are a clear record of climate change, of global warming.

The birds didn’t help this morning however. Here I’ve sat, alternately staring at my computer screen and out the window behind it, watching the birds.

The birds flying back and forth to the feeder are common, the birds I see at the feeder almost every day. There are house sparrows and mourning doves, a cardinal, two blue jays, a black-capped chickadee, a white-breasted nuthatch, a downy woodpecker, two tufted titmice. I’ve written about all of them, several more than once. They haven’t given me any ideas.

Two male red-winged blackbirds flew in and landed on the feeder a few minutes ago. Male redwings at a bird feeder in northern Indiana in December would have been a good subject a few years ago. Not anymore. I see male redwings every day except the most stormy. I saw male redwings at my bird feeder every day last winter, as far as I remember, and the winter before. I’ve seen as many as five male redwings at the feeder recently.

A female redwing at my feeder now would be something else. While more and more male redwings no longer migrate south in the fall, or so it seems, females still must migrate. At least, they disappear as the days get shorter.

My thoughts wandered. A phrase from a song that was popular when I was young came to mind. “I go to the woods.” Is my subconscious giving me an idea. Is it suggesting I should go to a woods where I’ll see birds that I won’t see at my bird feeder? Wild turkeys, for example, either in the woods or in a field at the edge of the woods. I might see crossbills in a woods. Crossbills are rare winter visitors to Indiana. I’ve only seen them in Indiana two or three times, each time when I was walking in a woods.

I might see other animals, deer maybe. Fawns would have lost their spots and be nearly as big as their mothers now. Stags would have antlers. But I don’t have to go to a woods to see deer. I see them in the field across the road and crossing the road when I’m out driving.

I might see a raccoon. But I saw a ‘coon just a few days ago. It was one on a bird feeder on the other side of the house. There were three skunks on the ground under that feeder recently also. I’ve also seen ‘coons and skunks and opossums along roads recently, most of them dead, lying in the road or along the side. I might see a beaver or an otter if I went walking on a trail through a woods along a lake or river. I’ve seen both in the water and on the shore along trails in Chain O’ Lakes State Park.

I could write about fall color. But I don’t have to go out to see fall color. I see it from my window. The color doesn’t seem as bright this fall. And there isn’t as much of it. Though we’ve only had frost two or three mornings this fall, many leaves have already fallen. Our lawn is littered with them.

It’s been two hours since I sat down at my desk. Two hours since I sat down to write, and the screen of my computer is still blank except for the heading for an article.

I really should go out, go driving or walking, look for something different. But I won’t go now. While I’ve been sitting here the sky has gotten darker and now it’s starting to rain…

To the south two other species of pine, longleaf and loblolly, were as abundant as white pine to the north and all three were excellent for building cabins and for firewood. Further, the soil was fertile. When the trees had been cut, the land cleared, crops planted by settlers grew well.

I live one mile from Chain O’ Lakes State Park and just a few miles from an area designated as the Lloyd W. Bender Memorial Forest. I visit Chain O’ Lakes and Bender Memorial Forest regularly. Both are woodlands but I don’t go to see the trees. I go to look for birds. But there were few birds about, however, as I walked a path through the woods on a recent visit to Bender, so I look at trees and wildflowers and other vegetation.

A few days before my recent visit to Bender I had read a book about pioneer days in America. Trees covered much of the continent then, all but the central plains or prairie, sometimes called the great American desert, the southwest, part of which truly was desert, and the higher elevations of the Rocky Mountains. I thought about the pines of the north, growing as far west as the Dakotas. I thought about the pines of the south. I thought about the giant trees of the northwest, the redwoods, the biggest living things known, and the sequoias, the tallest living things.

I thought about the oldest living things, also trees and also North American, bristlecone pines growing in the mountains of eastern Nevada. Using increment borers scientists had taken tree ring samples of the bigger bristlecones and counted the growth rings. One they sampled had 4,676 rings. Each ring in the trunk of a tree represents one year of growth so that tree, which they named Methuselah, was 4,676 years old, and still living.

A few years later, a graduate student studying geography and climate made borings in another stand of bristlecones still in Nevada but farther east. There he found one in a National Forest that was bigger than the Methuselah tree. He named it Prometheus.

With the permission of someone in the Forest Service and with the assistance of two Forest Service employees he cut Prometheus down, then counted the growth rings. It had 4,744. Prometheus had been older than Methuselah!

In the view of the American settlers, trees, and birds, were natural resources to be used however and as much as the settlers saw fit. By intensive hunting, market hunting and forest elimination they exterminated the passenger pigeon, once the most numerous species of bird in the world. They reduced the bison or American buffalo, one of the most numerous mammals in the world, to small, scattered herds. They introduced chestnut blight and Dutch elm disease to North America, inadvertently, but no matter how these diseases were introduced they wiped out two of America’s most numerous, wide spread and beneficial trees, the American chestnut and the American elm.

Fortunately, I thought as I walked beneath the spreading branches of the trees of Bender, many Americans have now developed an environmental consciousness. Responding to this consciousness, this voice from the people Congress has passed laws protecting birds and trees and mammals and other living plants and animals.

At that point my thoughts were terminated by a flash of lightning, a rumble of thunder and I hurried back to my car, getting there just as rain started to fall.

With relief efforts underway in Texas and Louisiana, another hurricane to the east, Hurricane Irma, roared over the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, destroying nearly everything on the islands. From Puerto Rico, Irma moved north, striking the Florida Keys, then, moving up the Florida peninsula and into Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina, causing property damage, blowing down trees and electric power lines and causing extensive flooding.

Now, as I write this, there’s another hurricane, Jose, pronounced Hozay.

Hurricanes are storms with winds of 72 miles per hour that occur in the Atlantic Ocean and in the Caribbean. Such storms in the Pacific Ocean are called typhoons.

I have been in both hurricanes and typhoons but always on ships at sea, never on land however. The most severe I was ever in was a typhoon. I was a Navy officer serving aboard a destroyer. At the peak of the storm the ship rolled 52 degrees to port and to starboard. When I tell people of the storm I am often asked if a got sea sick and if I was scared. I did not get sea sick nor was I scared. As for my feelings, the thing I remember most was how tired I was after the storm, tired from holding on, keeping from falling as I moved about the ship performing my duties and as I stood watch on the bridge.

While I’ve never been in a hurricane, or a typhoon on land nor visited an area soon after a hurricane has passed, I’ve seen the reports on TV. While I’ve watched TV and seen the scenes of devastation, damaged homes and other buildings, trees and power lines down, people wading, people being rescued, people crowded in rescue mission, I’ve frequently thought about birds and other wildlife.

Before Hurricane Harvey gulls and terns would have been numerous along the coasts of Texas and Louisiana flying up and down the shore, swimming, standing and walking on the land. There would have been sandpipers and petrels and other shore birds. There would have been cormorants and brown pelicans and great blue herons.

Inland there would have been little birds, song birds. Since it was late in the year many of the little birds would have been migrants, some there for the winter, some feeding, preparing to fly across the Gulf of Mexico and spend the winter in South America. Among them would have been ruby-throated hummingbirds, feasting, gaining as much as half their body weight to give them enough energy to fly across the Gulf of Mexico. Did the birds anticipate the approach of Harvey and either leave or get into dense cover?

In Florida there would have been even more birds, blue and tricolored herons, anhingas, brown pelicans, common and snowy and reddish egrets and an abundance of song birds. After each ocean oil spill I’ve seen TV news accounts of birds being rescued. I haven’t seen a thing about birds in the accounts of Harvey and Irma.

What happened to other wildlife, animals that couldn’t fly away as birds could, particularly mammals, deer and squirrels, woodchucks and raccoons and opossums, field mice and voles and, in Texas, armadillos?

Raccoons are also common though they are not commonly seen. They are nocturnal, animals of the night, and of woodlands and forests. But two raccoons visited the bird feeder outside my dining room window several nights last spring. I saw them when I went to the door and let the dog out in the evening, after dark, before going to bed. I don’t know where they came from. I live in the country but not in a forest. There is a wooded area across the road.

Raccoons are good climbers and they are game animals. Hunters use dogs to locate them. They are not fast and when a dog, or a pack of dogs gets on the trail of one, after a short pursuit it goes up a tree where the hunter can pick it off with his gun.

In addition to forested land, raccoons like water. They are often seen wading along streams and rivers and around the margins of lakes, dabbling in the water, catching crayfish, frogs and small fish. Seen frequently sloshing prey about in the water, it is often said that raccoons wash their prey.

I’ve seen four coons, as they are often called, during the day recently. Not together and all dead, lying along the side of the highway near my home.

There are two times of the year when coons wander greatly, sometimes for a considerable distance. One, which was captured, radio-tagged and released, was recaptured 58 miles from where it had been tagged.

Beginning in late summer and extending into the early fall, now, is one of those times when many raccoons are particularly mobile. It’s the time when families are breaking up, when young raccoons are leaving their mother and litter mates, setting out on their own.

The other time raccoons wander more than their usual nightly perambulations is in late winter and early spring, the time of mating. Then it’s the adults that do the wandering, particularly the males. Mating is in February or March and the young are born in April or May. The average litter size is four or five but I read it may be as many as nine.

Raccoons hole up. When not wandering they take shelter in hollows in trees, in hollow logs and in caves. Their young are born in those dens. There raccoons also take shelter from inclement weather, heavy rain or snow and cold. But they don’t hibernate. They frequently stay in a den for several days in winter, fasting, sleeping deeply, but then they’ll be out and about, prowling, searching for food, eating, replenishing the winter fat supply.

Raccoons are omnivorous. They eat almost anything edible, grain, nuts, fruit. They eat grasshoppers and other insects. They raid bird nests and eat eggs and nestlings. To the displeasure of farmers, they kill and eat chickens and their eggs. They are especially fond of corn in the milk stage, days before it is considered ready to harvest. A raccoon or two or more in a corn field is a disaster. Several raccoons will strip the ears from the stalks and lay waste to an acre or more of corn in a night.

In spite of their depredations on fruit, corn, chickens and eggs, raccoons are popular animals. Their masked face gives them a mischievous look and many people like seeing a coon. I do, and I felt a twinge of sadness at each one I saw by the road recently.

A sparrow hawk was a colorful bird, rusty red spotted with black on its back and tail, blue on its wings, also spotted with black. It was blue on the top of its head, white with two black vertical bands on each side of its face. Its wings were pointed, its tail rounded on the end.

Sparrow hawks preyed on small animals of the fields, mice and voles, grasshoppers and crickets and other insects. They hunted by perching on a power line, watching below, launching and plunging on prey they spotted on the ground. They also hunted by hovering, then dropping to the ground. So often were they seen hovering that they were often called windhover birds or just windhovers.

English sparrows were LBJs, little brown jobs. A male was dark brown, striped on the back, dark brown on the sides of its face and back of its neck, had a gray crown, white marked with black on the sides of its face, a black throat and was buffy underneath. A female was brown striped on the back, buffy underneath.

The range of the sparrow hawk was from the East Coast to the West Coast, Florida and Mexico and north into northern Canada, even into southern Alaska in summer. In winter it withdrew from the northern part of its range. Snow determined the northern limit of its winter range. Deep snow hid its prey and made birds in the northern part of its range fly farther south.

The range of the English sparrow was Florida and Mexico and north into northern Canada. It favored the homes of people, cities and towns and farm homes, nesting often in crevices of buildings. It also nested in bluebird houses and the compartments of purple martin houses. It was belligerent enough to drive bluebirds and purple martins out. Throughout its range it was a permanent resident, non-migratory.

Sparrow hawks and English sparrows are still with us but with different names. That’s a good thing in my opinion. If sparrow hawks had preyed on English sparrows, or any kind of sparrow the name would have been appropriate but they rarely caught sparrows or any birds. Well, half of the name would have been appropriate. But it’s not a hawk, it’s a falcon. So the name was changed to kestrel, or American kestrel to distinguish it from a look-alike bird of Europe.

English sparrow was also an inappropriate name. The bird is common not only in England but also throughout most of Europe, Asia and much of Africa. To us it’s an introduced species. The first introduction was eight pairs released in Brooklyn, New York in 1850. More were released in several other locations in the U.S. This is a hardy and prolific bird. A pair will raise two, three, even four broods of four or five young in a season. It multiplied and spread rapidly until it occupied all of North America.

Additionally, the once named English sparrow isn’t a sparrow. True sparrows, song, chipping, white-throated, white-crowned, fox and all the other true sparrows, are birds of North America. This interloper is a weaver finch. But its name wasn’t changed to some kind of weaver finch; it was changed to house sparrow.

Sparrow hawk and English sparrow, common birds when I was a boy. Now they are both gone, in name, and in their place we have kestrel and house sparrow.

When we moved here we saw bats every summer night we went out if the weather was fair, circling around that light, the barn, the house. But ten, fifteen, twenty years ago the bats were gone. Was the bat my daughter saw a few nights ago a harbinger of bats returning? I hope so.

Bats are welcome around my home. They feed on mosquitoes and other insects and that suits me fine. A little brown bat, one of the species we have in Indiana, will eat three to four thousand mosquitoes in a single night, according to one researcher. It will also eat flies, beetles, bugs, anything it seems, that flies and is small enough for a bat to catch.

When I was young I was told that bats caught insects like swallows, by snatching them out of the air in their mouths. Many people still believe that. But high-speed motion photography has shown it’s not true. Bats catch mosquitoes and other prey, one at a time, in the fold of a wing, then grab it with their sharp pointed teeth.

Bats have always been welcome to me but they weren’t to my wife. Once when she awoke in the morning there was a bat in our bedroom, flying. My wife grabbed my arm, yelled “There’s a bat in here,” piled out of bed and out of the bedroom, slamming the door behind her. The bat circled the room, then landed on a curtain. I got up, picked it off the curtain and carried it outside. My wife screamed at me as I walked past, “Kill it! Kill it! Kill it!” I didn’t. I let it go outside.

Bats are not only beneficial, they are fascinating to watch, to me anyhow. They dart about in the air more erratically and more swiftly than swallows. Their eyesight is excellent but they also have echolocation.

Echolocation is radar, emitting sound waves then receiving and interpreting waves that echo back from anything they strike. This enables bats to fly in total darkness or when their eyes are taped shut as has been done in experiments.

Most species of bats are small. All of the bats of North America are, certainly all I’ll ever see in Indiana. But there are a few species that are larger, much larger. They are called fruit bats or flying foxes and have wings up to five feet from tip to tip when spread. They eat fruit, not insects and they live in the tropics. They are called fruit bats or flying foxes.

Bats are mammals and like other mammals they give birth to living young. They mate in the fall but don’t give birth until the spring. A female has one or two young at a time, usually just one. A young bat clings to its mother until it is able to fly even when the mother is flying, hunting. A female does sometimes hang her baby on a ledge, by its hind feet, while she goes hunting.

Vampire bats also do not eat insects. Nor do they eat fruit. They live on blood but they don’t suck blood as is commonly believed. They bite, then lap up the blood with their tongue. Vampire bats, like fruit bats, do not live in North America, only in Central and South America.

Bats are sometimes called dirty but they aren’t. They groom themselves frequently. Nor do they carry bedbugs and drop them in homes as has been said. There is one strike against bats, however they do carry rabies. But the incidence of rabies in bats is extremely low. I’d gladly take a chance if bats would return and fly around our house and barn on summer nights again.

This was a small turtle, a pond or marsh turtle, a turtle seen most often with others of its kind on a log, a muskrat house, a floating mass of vegetation, sometimes one turtle on another, basking, soaking up warmth from the sun. Turtles are reptiles, cold blooded animals. They live in water and get warmth from water, from air and from the sun. When the temperature of the water in which they live is warmer than the temperature of the air, even though there is ice on the water they move about and feed. They are sometimes seen swimming beneath the ice. When the temperature of the air is warmer than the water they come out of the water and lie in the sun, armored reptile sun bathers.

The turtle I saw in the road that day was a painted turtle. It was an adult, full grown, its carapace, the upper half of its shell, about five or six inches long. It was only slightly convex, not crowned or high as a box turtle or a snapping turtle. It had spots of red on the sides of the carapace, yellow on the sides of its neck and head.

Painted turtles are one of the most common turtles of North America. Yet to see one in a road, out of water, is not common. A painted turtle or other water dwelling turtle which might be seen in Northern Indiana, a snapping turtle, a spotted, a map, Blanding’s, which is endangered, or musk turtle, also called stinkpot and stinking jim, seen out of water is either moving from a water hole that has dried up or it’s looking for a mate or a place to lay eggs.

All turtles lay eggs, scraping out holes in the ground with their back legs or flippers, then backing up to the hole and dropping the eggs in. When a female turtle has laid her eggs she covers them, then leaves them. The temperature of the ground determines when they hatch. After hatching the young turtles dig their way out, then forage for themselves. Water turtles make their way to a wetland as they feed.

Curiously, the temperature of the ground also determines the sex of the young of some turtles. All the eggs that hatch when the temperature of the ground is within a certain range will be male, at another temperature range they’ll all be female.

A turtle I’ve never seen is a stinkpot or stinking jim. I’d like to see one, though I don’t want to get too near. They have scent glands like a skunk, two on each side where carapace and plastron join. From these they exude a foul smelling liquid. Fortunately for observers they can’t spray like a skunk.

Snapping turtles are other water dwellers and mature snappers are big. I saw an exceptionally big one once, near our barn, moving slowly in the direction of our marsh. I wish I had measured the length of its carapace. The record for the length of the carapace of a snapper is near twenty inches and that turtle looked that big.

Box turtles belong to the same category as water turtles but are more terrestrial, woodland turtles. Unlike painted turtles they have highly convex, domed carapaces. They are seen when the weather is warm beneath the canopy of a woodland.

There are other turtles, more than twenty species in North America.