Postcards from the Rogue Valley

“Goats, sheep, wild turkeys, and other animals have been spotted strolling through streets and plazas in cities around the world lately,” the New Yorker’s David Remnick writes. “On certain days it can appear that many places are being reclaimed, at least in part, by nature.”

Where we live, there’s been a lot of animal reclaiming—less bucolic, alas, than the grazing sheep in the six-hour video loop (“Relax with Sheep”) that went viral a month ago.

Here’s what it looks like.

Deer

Southern Oregon is deer heaven. When Tony and I moved to Ashland two years ago, I kept reaching for my phone to record the deer grazing in our backyard, only a few feet from our living room window. Our Brooklyn grandson, then three years old, called them “our Bambi’s.”  I soon learned that in this pristine town, deer are everywhere and what to do about them is an ongoing public debate. 

That first spring, I kept an eye out for “deer resistant” tags as I roamed local nurseries for plants to refresh the garden we had inherited. The horticultural expert at Ashland Greenhouses cautioned me that few plants are truly deer resistant: “The deer don’t read the labels.” She was right, of course. The hydrangea I planted that May disappeared overnight, as did the flowering day lilies. The pansies and geranium bloomed unscathed, though, and they became my go-to plants. 

This April, the deer went rogue and even devoured the pansies and geraniums I’d just tucked into pots.

“These deer ain’t no Bambi’s,” I told my grandson. Determined, I re-planted “my” pansies and petunias, this time spraying them with manure. 

Bears

While the deer come to town for backyard treats, the bear come for the garbage. In our neighborhood, bordering on the Siskiyou mountains and forests, bears “have been known” to take shots at trash bins put out the night before morning garbage collection. 

Recently, though, it seems the bears decided to stage a flash mob. Early one morning, as Tony and I headed down the hill for a questionable COVD-19 coffee run, overturned garbage cans and scavenged remains littered the street. Which do they prefer, we wondered: leftover pizza or rotisserie chicken? 

Citing an unusual increase in bear activity in our part of town, the Ashland Police Department advised residents to purchase a bear-proof trash can. Tony and I use a just-in-time approach.

Goldfish

Our house came with a “water feature”—in our case, a delightful goldfish pond. A water leak almost doomed the goldfish just before we arrived to claim ownership, but it’s been smooth sailing ever since, except for the day when a blue heron swooped down and swallowed a couple of fish (an ambush I miraculously captured on my iPhone).

Goldfish, we’ve discovered, often hibernate in winter. By mid-March, ours had yet to emerge from the bottom of the pond, despite warming temperatures. Tony and I have a habit of checking the goldfish several times a day, looking for reassurance, I guess, that all is right with the world. Our hearts sank as the pond remained dark on every visit. Either an animal had eaten the fish (30 before they disappeared) or the pond had developed toxins, we figured.

Or maybe the goldfish had caught the coronavirus?

A neighbor said she’d seen a large blue heron sitting on the roof of our house scoping the pond. We rushed to Home Depot to buy a five-foot metal blue heron which, we were told, would keep the real heron at bay.  

A few weeks ago, one by one, the fish re-appeared. (Is this a sign that all’s right again with our pandemic-strained world?)

Frogs

In late winter, a young boy knocked on our door and asked if he could deposit a small frog he’d found into our pond. We said sure and forgot all about it.

On the night of May Day, as Tony and I were going to bed, a loud insect-like chirp emerged from the direction of the fish pond. It started and stopped throughout the night. The next evening, the chirp sounded more like a ribbit, calling “ooh-yeeh.” Night by night, more ribbits joined the night air. Within a week, our pond had given birth to a chorus of Pacific Tree Frogs.

“I like your new water feature,” a neighbor commented yesterday as I laid down mulch near the pond. “What feature?” I asked. “The frogs,” he said. “We can hear them ten houses away.” 

Spiders and ticks

Roseanna, the women who cleans our house once every two weeks, not only restores order but also unearths insects. Until recently, her finds have been limited to ants in corners. Now, baby black widow spiders and ticks have joined the list.

“Look what I found!” she said as she drew me into our living room a month ago. She showed me a nest of baby black widow spiders in one of the potted plants I’d brought in from outside, plus two tiny spiders rappelling down from the ceiling. “Never bring your outside plants in,” she advised. “You don’t know what they’re harboring.” 

That night, I was awakened from sleep by a sharp sting below my ear. A bathroom mirror check revealed nothing and I chalked it up to an unusually vivid dream. A day later, a red bump began to unfold in the questionable spot and, as I made the bed, I saw a small spider descending towards my pillow. I’d always believed that killing a spider in your house brings bad luck. I’ve changed my mind.

At Roseanna’s next visit, she asked (with a tad of smugness), “You know you have ticks?”

It didn’t take much sleuthing to figure out how they’d arrived: in the fur of our two outdoor cats, Pesto and Buna, who roam the meadow and thickets next to us. Later that day when I groomed Pesto, a long-haired coon cat, I found several gorged ticks that hadn’t been there a few days before. An emergency trip to the vet and an application of Revolution Plus set things right.

Birds

Bird lovers won’t like this and I don’t expect their forgiveness. 

When we first moved to Ashland, Pesto and Buna, who had looked longingly out the windows of our Brooklyn apartment, demanded their freedom. They won, coming and going through a cat door we installed in our garage. We worried about their becoming prey; it turned out that they were the predators. Birds have been a ready target.

Pesto, the male, prefers to bring in his birds live, often very live. He enters through the cat door, opens his mouth and meows, and the bird flies off, sometimes touring our house before we (a.k.a. Tony) manage to point him out a patio door. Buna, the female, likes her birds small and dead. She brings them in and proceeds to eat them before we discover the crime and cut short the dismemberment. 

These spring days, the Mountain Blue Jays have been raising a racket. One day last week, Pesto brought in one of the biggest jays I’d ever seen, unharmed and eager to leave. That afternoon, we spied Buna vanquishing a baby jay in our back yard. The squawking from two male adult jays alerted us to the drama. We shooed Buna away, but we were too late.

The adult jays then swooped down and took turns trying to retrieve the body and fly away with it. One finally succeeded. 

Rodents

I still can’t tell whether we have mice or rats, maybe both. Rodent droppings across our white bathroom vanity offered the first—and repeating nightly—clue that we had a problem, though I couldn’t figure out for the life of me why the bathroom. Were the critters after the soap and toothpaste (I wiped the water from the sink every night before retiring)? My lipstick? And how did they get in, since everything was tightly sealed? The mystery continued.

Then, one morning, when I opened a drawer in the kitchen, I found a rat (it looked too big for a mouse) hanging out between the plastic bags and aluminum wrap. I screamed, he shuddered, jumped out and scurried behind the fridge, never to be seen again. I spent the next three hours cleaning every drawer in the kitchen, then put the drawers back, adding perfumed dryer sheets on the wild thought that they would be a deterrent. The rodent(s) moved on, but droppings started to appear in other rooms.

The “humane” traps we set had no takers, even when I switched out the chunky peanut butter for smooth. And the rodents, we learned, were entering through heating vents in the floor. (“Duh,” some of you might say.)

Tomorrow, the pest control person we contacted a month ago finally comes—business has been especially brisk, he tells us. In the meantime, I’ve been putting rugs over the heating vent in our bathroom, adding weights for extra measure.

And where have our prey-loving cats been? Pesto, it turns out, isn’t a mouser, but Buna is. She prefers field to house mice, though, and has been dragging them inside in droves. Four on Friday, three on Saturday, two on Sunday. Some she lets lie, some she consumes (dear God!) leaving only the entrails. 

Tony and I have no need to pass COVID-19 watching Animal Planet on our Roku TV. We are living it.

What I would give for grazing sheep.

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