Critters Just Come With the Territory
I get many calls and letters about wild animals behaving badly in the garden, but--call me lucky or a softy--I find most are good gardening companions, certainly nothing to get worked up about.
I don’t mind if they also dig in the garden or if they take home some of the bounty. I think of them as simply part of the garden, as interesting and enjoyable as the flowers or fruit I grow. I can repair the damage or plant more. They’re one of the reasons I don’t use poisons, maybe one of the reasons I garden.
Now, I must admit I don’t have some of the peskiest, like roof rats and gophers, and I live too far inside the city to have deer or frequent raccoons, but I’ve had squirrels, possums, lizards, toads and lots of birds. Some are my gardening buddies, out there working in the garden right along side me, even if we are sometimes at cross-purposes.
Some help; others just keep me company, animating the garden. I’ve watched mockingbirds carefully search my tomatoes for hornworms, and I’ve heard possums crunching on snails at night. The scrub jays and squirrels like to follow me around the garden, never more than a few feet away, to see what I turn up: perhaps a nut they’ve forgotten about or some tasty bug.
Right now, my wife and I are enjoying being grandparents to baby jays and squirrels. In spring, the garden is as full of babies as it is of flowers, much to the delight of these parents whose own children are all away at college.
The last few weeks, it appears we’ve been baby-sitting infant jays. Out of sticks, and fibers from our doormat, a pair of scrub jays built a ragged nest in an overgrown pittosporum next to the house. Now there are scrawny young peeking over the rim, like babies in a washtub.
The parents are extremely protective, loudly screeching at every animal that comes remotely near. They dive and swoop at our cats, of course, but also hound the squirrel, hummingbirds, even hapless doves. They chase crows like little blue fighters swirling around big black bombers.
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We’re the only ones who don’t get chased or screeched at, even when we peek into the nest. In fact, I’ve noticed that whenever I sit outside, the parents feel free to leave the yard, which is why I suspect I’m being used as a baby-sitter. Otherwise, they are never far from the nest.
I wouldn’t put it past them--scrub jays are very clever birds. Somebody in the neighborhood taught one of ours to pluck peanuts from fingers on the fly, and the jay, like some aerial artist, has gone on to invent countless variations on this game. One of his current favorites is to touch down briefly on my head before snagging the nut.
Every time he grabs a peanut, he lands just a few feet away and turns around to show us his catch, and how clever he is. We always say, “What a clever bird!”
Then he flies off to bury the nut in a flower pot or in the garden beds, pounding it into the soil with his black beak and carefully covering it with fallen leaves. Once in a while he actually eats one, but I suspect he’s mostly in it for the sport, like your typical fisherman.
He will fly into my office and sit on the filing cabinets near the door or sit outside the kitchen window waiting for us to pass him a peanut through the screen.
In the garden, the jays are never far away, quickly grabbing bugs that scurry for cover as I work. They get real excited when I turn the compost pile, finding all sorts of tasty treats.
They’re so quick I’m not sure what they’re eating, but it seems to be sowbugs, centipedes and the like. They definitely don’t like the fat June bug larva I hopefully toss toward them and, of all things, they shun worms.
The peanuts they bury mostly get found by the squirrel. We have only one because she chases all other squirrels out of our garden. Right now, she’s raising a litter and when they’re grown, she’ll chase them out too. We know because she’s done it before. Her nest is a bigger, higher pile of sticks.
She too had been trained by someone to beg for peanuts, standing on her hind legs, swaying back and forth, little paws extended. It’s impossible to say no, though usually I’m against the idea of taming wild animals.
When she takes a peanut, she is so gentle and careful, though my wife, who often goes barefoot in the garden, worries that toes look a little too much like peanuts.
She also comes into the house to beg and can somehow climb the slippery refrigerator to see if we’re still keeping the peanuts on top. Nope, moved them into a heavy cookie jar after we got tired of cleaning up the mess. Outside, she will climb my jeans and sit on my knee to eat, loudly breaking open the shell then quickly peeling the thin skin from each peanut.
The jays and squirrel get whole, roasted, unsalted peanuts, and we’re obviously not the only providers in the neighborhood, since the local market is always running out.
Our squirrel digs in the garden and eats a few tangerines, but she’s anything but a pest. Frankly, my cats are a bigger nuisance, making much larger holes and usually in my best prepared soil. The cats, incidentally, are uninterested in the squirrel and not nearly clever enough to catch the jays (they do, on occasion, bring rats and mice to the backdoor).
The jays probably eat as many good bugs as bad, so neither of these animals actually helps with the gardening, but they’re fine company. Even if they weren’t so tame, I’d welcome them because their activities bring life to the garden. So if you call to complain about animals in the garden, don’t expect too sympathetic an ear.
Excuse me while I go get another peanut.
