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As I finished my workout early one morning last week, I glanced out the open garage door and saw a porcupine ( Erethizon dorsatum) strolling across the driveway. It followed the fence around to the backyard, climbed a juniper and settled itself down on a limb for the day. It paid no attention to us even when we approached it for a closer look. That evening about dusk it roused itself and I saw it in the front following the fence again. I opened the gate to the rest of SA and it ambled out as though that the was opening it had been looking for.
It stopped at one of the apple trees and apparently was able to find some of the few apples that had fallen and dried up. It wasn’t a good year for fruit and there weren’t many but it took advantage of what there were. There are some concerns about d0g-porcupine conflict in certain quarters. Dogs learn a gruesome lesson when they do their dog thing with porcupines. Since porcupines are nocturnal and Tino the dog doesn’t get out except on a leash, chances of an incident are small . Aside from that, we don’t know what damage it might do to vegetables and grapes. It could make a nuisance of itself. We haven’t seen it since that one day so maybe it has moved on.
When last I was at the Bluff, I was trimming vegetation along the creek and saw a garter snake that had a frog by the foot. It was a small snake, maybe the thickness of my index finger and the frog was an adult so I don’t know how the snake could swallow it. Snakes have amazing powers of expansion but this one would have to be able to swallow a deck of cards to get the job done. The frog’s leg was damaged, maybe by the trimmer, and that could have been why the snake took a chance on it. It’s not easy to witness the harshness of nature first hand but I went on about my business without interfering.
You may recall I complained earlier in the summer about the hummingbirds getting their beaks out of joint because we put a new feeder out. They wanted their old one, I guess, and the vindictive little peckers boycotted us for several weeks. We put the old feeder out and, though it took a while, they finally got over their huff. A rufous hummingbird was the first to show up and it stayed around several days before moving on. Now there is a black chin, the variety that summers in this area, and another one I can’t identify. They vie for access to the feeder with the black chin holding sway, which doesn’t stop the other one from slipping in for a sip when the black chin isn’t looking. For all that, the black chin is the shyer of the two and usually visits the other side of the feeder when we are at the kitchen table, but the other one will hover at the window and examine us as though it had never seen anything so strange.