August, Part 1: The bear necessities and other close encounters of the mammalian kind

A two-part digression from more important matters

(Listen to the radio version here.)

Every night before I go to bed, I take my little dog Pip outside. She’s very much a female, but I named her for a boy—the main character of Great Expectations—because Charles Dickens famously gave his children a Havanese like Pip.

Anyway, Pip weighs nine pounds and change, so I have to be careful about her alone in the backyard. Raccoons and skunks are often about…

…people regularly see red and gray foxes here and there, coyotes have been seen less than a mile away, and I’ve seen seven different species of owls right here on my own little corner of Peabody Street!¹ The one I hear most often throughout the year happens to be the most powerful one—the Great Horned Owl.

The heaviest Great Horned Owls weigh little more than 5 pounds and they average only about 3 pounds. Even the strongest and heaviest couldn’t lift a dog Pip’s size to fly away with her, but even the weakest could kill her with those powerful talons and beak. When Great Horned Owls kill anything too heavy to lift, it’s easy for them to ratchet the animal’s head into their capacious mouth and lop it off cleanly at the neck, preventing the feathers lining the edges of their mouth from getting all gooped up with blood. When people find decapitated rabbits in their yard, the perpetrator is almost always a Great Horned Owl.

Anyway, that’s an interesting factoid in the abstract, but not in reference to my little dog. So we never ever let Pip out at night without one of us going out with her.

Sunday night when I took her out about 10:30 before bedtime, she suddenly charged over to our side yard. I knew something had to be there and called to her urgently, but she ignored me and came face to face with a skunk.

There’s a family of skunks somewhere near here—I’ve recently seen an adult waddle through my yard a couple of times, and I occasionally get a whiff from far off. Some years we’ve had a whole family hanging out here, but only twice in the 43 years we’ve lived here has one of our dogs been skunked, the last time 20 years ago. The skunks in my neighborhood do their best to avoid dogs.

But suddenly Pip was having a close encounter of the skunk kind.  It was too dark for me to see the little mammal’s face—just the white stripe down the back and up the raised tail. Unbelievably and fortunately, that tail was raised away from Pip! I couldn’t see well enough to be sure whether they actually touched noses, but they certainly came close. And then Pip turned and ran to me, happy to have made a new friend and ready for her bedtime snack, and the skunk either left or didn’t. Pip and I went inside and that was that.

I’m still bewildered why the skunk didn’t skunk Pip. Is it a young one who didn’t know anything about dogs? Or a mature one who has observed how my backyard squirrels ignore her? I will never understand why this particular skunk was so tolerant of my little dog, but I’m happy—to say nothing of relieved—that it was.

I was pretty sure that would be it for mammal encounters that night, but nope. When I woke up in the morning, Russ had already fixed our gate latch and our two suet feeders and was in the middle of fixing the feeder pole.

The gate in the background has been bent and knocked down a good dozen times since we’ve lived here. And that feeder pole is badly bent at the base (hidden behind the squirrel baffle). This was not our first visit by a bear!

Yep—after our skunk left, a bear arrived. I have no idea how bears recognize the chain-link gate on a chain-link fence, but the many times a bear has visited our yard over the years, it’s always knocked in the gate rather than climbing over the fence. As summer draws to a close, we try to remember to bring in the feeders before dark and then, when we take our dog out before bed, we try to remember to unlatch the gate so if a bear does come, it won’t bust it in. We should have started this on August first, but oh, well. Live and learn. I’ll mark that in my calendar for next year.

1. Yep. Seven species right here in my own yard:

• Eastern Screech-Owl

• Great Horned Owl

• Barred Owl

• Great Gray Owl

• Long-eared Owl

• Boreal Owl

• Northern Saw-whet Owl