The Coronavirus and Animal Liberation

It is an ill wind that bloweth no man good, and I suspect that future commentators will find that even in the lowering sky of a viral pandemic there was an odd silver lining or two.  I certainly hope so, for like so many others I am left exhausted and jittery by the duration and uncertainty of the imposed social restrictions, and seriously depressed by the national trauma accompanying, and to a significant degree exacerbated by them.  Here on our little acre we have already been delighted by one apparent development, a redress in the animal kingdom that is to a measurable degree humiliating some of the imperial claims of the human species.

We live on a fairly quiet street, though we see little of it, there being no windows facing onto it.  All the house’s kinetic instincts, and thus also those of its inhabitants, are directed towards the open and inviting land to the back of the house, which features about thirty feet of wall to ceiling windows, successfully designed to blur to a large extent the indoors/outdoors distinction.  Nature, which is highly visible, seems very close.  And since our modest private property abuts a largish track of heavily wooded commons, one has the very real sense of rustication: not quite Walden Pond, but not suburbia either.

About two weeks into the lockdown we became acutely aware of birdsong.  There has always been a lot of it in our yard, but suddenly the dawn chorus was sounding more like a symphony.  Then there simply seemed to be more and brasher birds around the yard all day.  The traffic on the bird-feeder in the atrium, of which I have a view from my study, suggested a sudden increase in the feathered population altogether.  Objective means of testing these impressions were lacking, but people with whom we spoke often shared them.  Then we saw in the Times a brief piece confirming the idea with regard to New York City.  The explanation was twofold.  There was in the first place much less sonic competition with vehicular movement virtually eliminated; so one heard the birds more clearly.  Then, too, the birds themselves were enjoying cleaner as well as quieter air, and tended to feel bird-frisky.  And as you know, if you read it in the Times, it’s bound to be true.

And as with the birds, so also with the beasts.  Of the latter there has always been a considerable variety resident in the back yard, mainly little, furry critters: chipmunks, rabbits, squirrels, and of course the dreaded groundhogs.  All of these suddenly seem more numerous, darting or waddling about the lawns, climbing trees, popping in and out of stone crevices according to their various natures.  Except for the groundhogs, which remain as timorous as they are obnoxious, these little animals also seem to be growing bolder, showing little concern for any human beings who happen to be sharing their space.  In insomniac moments I sometimes hear the creatures of the night—opossums and raccoons—feuding or scrapping around the garbage bins, and in daylight hours abundant spoor is to be seen in places likely and unlikely, such as the flat tops of stone walls, from which small, dark, shiny, dew-covered turds sparkle in the rising sunlight.

Above all, there are the deer.   The deer are a perennial subject of controversy in the neighborhood, and for understandable reasons.  They make it very difficult to have a vegetable garden without investing in expensive fencing more appropriate for a maximum security prison.  Though they seem to move lightly and gracefully, their dainty hooves are specially designed for smashing flower beds.  What they eat from those beds is a bit hit-or-miss, a favorite hit unfortunately being all varieties of tulips, and practically any seedling of anything .  (Daffodils are safe, thank God.)  People also worry, and not unnecessarily, about the small deer ticks that can spread Lyme disease.  This is not a problem to be pooh-poohed, as anyone who has suffered from Lyme will appreciate.  But I am from Arkansas, and you don’t really know what ticks are, or how to combat them, if you have never been to the Ozarks.  I tend to think that they are just one of the prices paid for living in a beautiful place.  Can you imagine Vermont without noseeums?  Of course my view that the inconveniences of a vast deer herd in your backyard is on a level with that of poor cell-phone reception in a national park is not widely shared.

Be that as it may, the deer herd has been ostentatiously flourishing throughout the coronavirus pandemic.  The fawning season, if there is such a term, pretty much coincides with the sprouting of the bamboo recently covered in this blog, and one frequently sees tinies on the margins of a squad of ten or twelve adults.  No fewer than three deer babies have been born in my yard in the last three weeks.  We are getting used to being a cervine maternity ward.  Faithful readers of the blog may remember that we had a birth on our actual doorstep two years ago. But now the numbers seem to me staggering.  I also detect, unless my imagination is running away with me, a measurably higher degree of deer self-confidence and adventurousness.  They seem to know they are now living in a more deer-friendly world. 

            We had an interesting “incident” a few days ago.  The guys who do the lawn, sort of, use a large and noisy riding mower.  While starting off on the front they seriously frightened a mother and her fawn, who had been hanging out I know not where in the bushes, and the panicked youngster fled to our open carport and hid, for a time successfully, behind a piece of heavy printing equipment stored among the chaos of the back wall.  It took me some real effort first to find this deer-child and then to free it from its dangerous refuge.  The whole time the terrified mother champed on the front tarmac.  When I finally freed the fawn, both fled, but not very far, to our neighbor’s lawn and thence to the middle of the currently underused public street.  The mother bathed her infant with her tongue.  I suspect that the dramatic reduction in vehicular traffic on the roads has been gratefully absorbed in the consciousness of animals no less than in my own.

            The speed with which “my” animals seem to be responding to environmental amelioration leads me to hope, against the global-warming apocalyptics, that the extinction of Mother Earth would be much harder to achieve than some believe.  And on a simplified, purified planet we might even see the emergence of a new Peaceable Kingdom.  A fox family has recently taken up residence in the vicinity, and Papa Fox is partial to a short-cut at the bottom of my garden.  The other days I saw him marching purposefully past a cohort of ten or twelve munching deer.  Neither fox nor deer paid the slightest attention the one to the other beyond, of course, the observance of appropriate social distancing.