City Wildlife
When I was preparing to move away from my rural Arkansas paradise, I had misgivings about giving up my elevated blind in the woods. Out in Grandview, I could sit on my second story screened porch, where, if I was quiet, my presence was obscured from a visitor’s awareness, and I could watch nature do its thing.
A doe and her young would prance around under the fruit trees. Groundhogs, squirrels and rabbits would wander through the greenery. Birds would sit in the trees that nearly touched my screens. Some even built nests under the eaves of my porch and I could watch the next generation hatch. Large black snakes would occasionally crawl on the floorboards outside the screen and startle me—until I remembered they are the good guys. Occasionally a horse or a bull from the neighbor’s farm would visit and put on a show.
I thought moving to a town might find me pining for wildlife. But I’ve found plenty of it. Canada geese frequent the football field at the park on my street. There’s a family of turkeys that wander around my neighborhood—stopping traffic, taking up residence in somebody’s yard for the day, then moving on.
Once, while walking Tootsie the Wonder Dog on the jetty in Lake Michigan, we both saw what I later determined to be a black mink dashing from one side of the walkway to the other and disappearing into the boulders that lead down to the water. (This, of course, made it difficult to get Tootsie home.)
Deer are plentiful here—I see them in multiple places, including leaping across the street in front of my car. Fortunately, traffic moves slowly in beach areas.
I’m enthralled by the cormorants—birds that dive completely underwater to catch a fish and disappear, eventually emerging yards away. Seagulls are all over town. I come out of the supermarket, and they are laughing in the sky over the parking lot. Makes me laugh, too. Every single time.
And one evening last week, Tootsie and I sat on the jetty at sunset, listening to the lake gallumping against the rocks on either side, while watching the seagulls put on an airshow. It was the first time I’d seen Tootsie calmly watching wildlife, rather than hunched in huntress mode. And I wondered if maybe she was—like me—envying their acrobatic talent. When I was a kid, my grandfather told me that when he died, he wanted to return as a cardinal. I thought returning as a bird sounded fine—but I wanted to be a water bird. Maybe Tootsie does, too.
But there’s one form of wildlife here that fascinates me more than any other, because it was so rare that I saw their ilk in my isolated Arkansas wilderness: people.
There are many different varieties in my new hometown: windsurfers, kiteboarders, fisherpeople, sailors gliding by on water vehicles of all shapes and sizes from tugboats to sailboats to rubber rafts with outboard motors, farmers and patrons at the second largest farmers’ market in the state, picnic eaters, bike riders, and, of course, dog walkers. Every single day, someone talks to me—anything from a quick “hello” to a family history of life in this town. And I always respond, gratefully.
In Arkansas, I knew my neighbors—and they would come to my rescue if I called—but I could go for days without seeing a soul. And that took an emotional toll. Turns out that people really do need people. And I was needier than I knew.