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Eyes in the Night -- Wildlife in the City
My wife and I live in the Oakland Hills in an area that used to be a redwood forest until almost all the redwoods were cut down at the beginning of the twentieth century. To replace the redwoods, pines were planted. These are now around 80 years old, and become fewer and fewer each year as some topple in winter storms and others are cut down before they fall across a street or onto somebody's house. Because of years of accumulation of pine needles, the soil in this area is somewhat acid. When we drive home after 11 at night, it isn't uncommon to find three or four deer roaming the streets and dashing off across somebody's yard as they see the lights of our car approach. Rarely do we see them during the day, but it does happen. Once during daytime I saw a doe dashing down a street in the heart of downtown Oakland. We live not far from the East Bay Regional Park, and I think that perhaps many of them live among the thick underbrush near the tops of the Oakland Hills, where the paved streets give way to densely overgrown parkland. If we put garbage out in unsecured trash cans, chances are great that in the middle of the night we'll hear a crash, our dogs will go crazy with barking inside the house, and we'll discover on looking out the back door that two or three raccoons have gathered to hunt for tidbits among the garbage. We don't usually see them during the day, but at dusk now and then we see them near the entrance of large street drains. On days when there hasn't been rain for a while, I think they live comfortably, safely and dry in these pipes and come out mostly at night to forage. We also occasionally see possums. Sometimes at night they scuttle across the street in our car's headlights. And if the raccoons are not about, they, too, search for something to eat among the trash cans and garbage. What I think is one lone skunk occasionally visits an enclosed area beneath our house. I don't often see him, but three or four times during the past decade I have just missed him by twenty feet or so as I returned at night down the path from the street to our house. I have never gotten close enough to be sprayed, but every few months the dogs will again go crazy. Then we'll suddenly get a strong pungency of skunk in the two or three back rooms of house. For some reason, maybe just as a safeguard in case it feels the dogs might come out and go after it, the skunk has let loose with its defenses. The smell lasts six or eight hours then dissipates. One interesting development in the San Francisco Bay Area during the last decade is the appearance of mountain lions. I have not yet seen one. But there are some areas where residents are told not to leave their dogs or cats outside overnight because the mountain lions just might come and get the pets for dinner. Mountain lions are supposed to be shy, but several people on the other side of the Bay near Palo Alto have actually seen and been attacked by mountain lions. You don't want to go hiking out in the bush there alone. I have an acquaintance in Berkeley, the city adjacent to Oakland, who also lives in the hills. He claims that he has seen mountain lion pawprints in his yard, and that he has twice seen their eyes glowing in the dark at night as he drove round a corner near his home. He swears these big cats roam his neighborhood. If they do, they undoubtedly live in the East Bay Regional Park District, which has a common boundary with his property. Whether it is his imagination or not I will never know, but this fellow claims that once he returned home in his car about 1 a.m. and had a frightening experience. As he got out of his car, he felt that something was very, very wrong. He raced to his house, dashed inside and slammed the door. He insists that about two seconds later he heard a loud thump such as one that the body of a mountain lion might make. Maybe the animals are becoming used to the urban habitat. Maybe in coming decvades the sight of eyes glowing in the night will become more common. |
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May, 2012
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