I am a primatologist who spends twelve hours most days in the company of a thirteen year old chimpanzee named Bow. I am also an editor with Inverted-A Press.
I have found that if I do a little mowing in the backyard every day, it does not have to become an overwhelming chore.
Leo is very invested in my mowing
I can take lots of little breaks to smell the flowers.
The Asian dayflowers bloom early each day and then wilt
Leo and Brownie and Bow are all there to participate, each in his own way.
Bow watches me as I mow from inside the outer pen
Sometimes I will take a break on the trampoline, and can view everything that is happening in the yard from a nice vantage point.
Of course, I am not as high up as, say, a kitten on the roof, but that is okay.
Even though I have only mowed about half the yard today, I can take time off when lunch comes around. Later Bow suggests that I go out for a walk in the front yard. I ask him why, and he says because it is good. But he adds: "רק אל תדברי עם החתול". "Just don't talk to the cat."
I don't talk to the kitten, but there is no way I can keep it from talking to me, as it meows at me from the roof as I go out the front door for my walk.
In the pasture there are many new flowers I have not seen before.
Because the path through the pasture passes right by the barn, I have been avoiding it, thinking this would get the kitten to following me.
But now that I know that the kitten does not spend any time in the barn at all, and that it is on the roof all the time, I feel better about venturing into this unspoiled wilderness without an exotic carnivore at my heals.
I can observe the bumblebee on the blossom without fear of disturbance from a feline follower.
"This blossom is occupied," said the beetle to the bumblebee.
On my way back down the path after completing a circuit of the pasture, I encounter a couple of turtles. They are going single file, one after the other.
Could it be mating season? Is this a male pursuing a female? (My turtle expert, Pam Keyes later confirms this.)
Just then I hear a meowing in the background.
The kitten suddenly appears and moves in to investigate.
Just let me check what it smells like!
This is a bit disturbing. What would a kitten do with a turtle, if left to its own devices? It backs away from the turtles when I am watching, but I do not trust it alone with them.
Eventually, as the kitten will not go far so long as the turtles are still there and I am still there, and I am concerned about what might happen if I leave first, I pick up the kitten by the scruff of its neck -- which it allows, as I am like a mother cat when I do this -- and I lock it momentarily in a storage building where we keep discarded toys.When I return moments later to check on the turtles, they are nowhere in sight. They move fast when you are not looking! So I go back and let the kitten out of storage. It follows me all the way home, and once I am inside it probably goes back up on the roof.
I meant to do as Bow asked and not talk to the cat, but that is more easily said than done.
When you have wild flowers in your yard, there will also be butterflies. Since I have left the Asian dayflower weeds alone when mowing the yard, there are now flowers there every day. They bloom in the morning and wilt at night. But every time I am in the backyard Bow and Leo and Brownie are all there.
Every time the dogs see that I am interested in something, they come huffing and puffing along to see what it is, and if I haven't frightened the butterfly away, the dogs always do. That's how I missed a perfectly good shot of a Red Admiral, and Common Buckeye and countless others that were attracted by the dayflowers. But yesterday I got lucky. Despite the chimp and dog noises, and with the dogs milling around everywhere, I got quite a few butterfly pictures, anyway.
There was a damaged red-spotted purple butterfly who took refuge on the wall of the house just above where the dog dishes were.
At about the same time, a silver spotted skipper came by and seemed to want to clean the dog food bowl.
There are always crumbs of dog food that no matter how hungry they are, the dogs cannot seem to lap up,
The skipper seemed to want to finish up the job.
Meanwhile, the damaged red-spotted purple was still in the area.
And though I thought that I had seen it take off over the wall, a little later I saw it, or a near relative with a damaged wing, in the back of the yard, by the trampoline.
On a nearby dayflower, an undamaged red-spotted purple was resting.
The dark blue of the red-spotted purple went well with the two blue petals of the dayflower.
You might think that with the much wider variety of flowers in my front yard and the pasture and the woods, there would be many more butterflies outside of the backyard with its barking dogs and displaying chimpanzee.
Ashy Sunflowers in the Pasture
And, of course, there are. There are, for instance, many yellow butterflies, clouded and unclouded sulfurs, I think they are called, but they are so flitty that they will not stop for a picture.
In the afternoon, I even thought I saw a Monarch flying over the pasture. But I could only film it from afar.
Happiness comes from the simple things. Like deciding to go outside on a foggy morning and lying on the bench in your own special way.
It is nice to have loyal friends like Leo and Brownie, and to be able to ignore them when you feel like it, and to engage them on your own terms when the spirit moves you.
Happiness, for a dog like Brownie, is being able to spend hours on end digging up rocks.
They say that the best things in life are free. Brownie agrees. He prefers playing with a rock he has dug up from the ground to doing almost anything else.
Of course, the rock isn't really free. We have to pay property taxes to the county and the state in order to be able to hold onto the land we own so we can keep digging up rocks. But Brownie does not know this.
I get a real jolt of joy every time I spot a butterfly and can observe it close up.
I enjoy the sunsets, with their special sights and sounds.
You would think that a sunset, at least, would be free, but even that is not strictly true. To have an unobstructed view of the horizon line and to be able to listen to the crickets and the cicadas and the birds without engine noises costs money. It's the money that it takes to live far, far away from other people.
These are flowers growing by the side of the road, just on the other side of the fence that delimits my property. Aren't they pretty? A couple of days ago the county mowers came and plowed them under. They are no more. But I enjoy the memory.
Limenitis Arthemis Astyanax.
Yesterday, I was finally able to film the red-spotted purple butterfly that can be found on my property. I have been seeing a lot of them everywhere, in the backyard or flying past the front porch or in the poison ivy that lines the lagoon, but up till now, none of them would sit still long enough for me to take a picture.
Limenitis Arthemis Astyanax. taking off
This one would not sit still very long, either. As I approached for a better look, it took off and then flew very close to my face, before disappearing into the pasture.
Limenitis Arthemis Astyanax.close to my face
Still, being able to get this close to the the red-spotted purple (aka Limentitis Arthemis Astyanax) makes me very happy.
I also enjoy observing those much tinier butterflies who turn from white to blue to white again.
They amaze me!
The rabbits on my property are so blasé about seeing me, they actually stop to scratch before they hop off.
I saw this little guy through my kitchen window as I was doing the dishes last night. Then when I went out to feed the kitten in the barn, he was still there.
That rabbit was so comfortable with my presence, that it stopped to scratch before taking evasive maneuvers. And guess what? The kitten was just around the corner of the house. It wondered what was taking me so long to get to the barn.
The best things in life are free, they say. Sure, they are free, after you finish paying for that freedom. Brownie, Leo and the kitten did not cost anything to acquire, but they cost a lot to keep. I often see these memes with a man, a woman and a child romping around on a beach. "The Best Things in Life Are Free" it says. "Oh, yeah?" I want to ask: "How much did that pretty wife (or sexy husband) set you back? How much money is that child costing you? How did you get to go to the beach?"
People have to save up before they can start a family. They need to put aside money for time to look at butterflies or talk with apes, too. Anytime you go after someone else's savings, you are attacking the simple things in life and making them definitely not free. If the price is too steep, all those things have to go.
Nothing that is worth having is free. It's a fact of life. But it should not cost you more than what it took to acquire and feed it. So the next time you go to the polls, vote for lower taxes, so that we don't have to pay for those free things over and over again, once we have gotten them. Real freedom is when you can stop paying for the right to keep what you already have.
The mowers came again yesterday, as the grass had been getting quite tall again. They hurried to get all done in one day this time, because as usual, we are expecting rain. Bow asked to go outside into the outer pen after they came, but when I opened the door, he gestured for me to come with him. I told him I would come, but I had forgotten to bring my phone to film with, so I went back inside
Alone in the pen with all that noise from the mowers, Bow looked unsure of himself.
When I came back out with the phone, I was surprised by a sight that I never expected to see: Bow was apologizing to Leo. I was not really ready -- it was so unexpected, that I not able to get pictures of the entire apology, so this is just the tail end of it.
Leo did not quite know what to make of Bow's apology, but even as the dog walked away, Bow was still trying to make up to him, with friendly faces.
This may look silly, but this is the face Bow makes when he is trying to ingratiate himself with someone
In case you want to refresh your memory as to what Bow's full apologies look like, you can read this post from 2013:
Now why would Bow feel he needed to apologize to Leo? What was he apologizing for? You may well ask. He was probably not apologizing for any specific thing, so much as trying to get into Leo's good graces. Bow had wanted me out there for moral support against the mowers. When I left, he felt a little abandoned. Rather than displaying at Leo, the way he usually does, Bow was trying to get Leo to help him against the mowers, in case he needed extra support. He was not saying "I am big and strong and I can beat you up!" as he usually does. He was saying: "If I was mean to you, I am sorry. Now please help me."
Bow's apologies, even when they are to Lawrence or to me, are extremely pragmatic in motivation. He does not really apologize because of heartfelt remorse. He apologizes because he's in trouble, and he is trying to get out of it. That's really not so different from most humans I know.
Even after I was out there and Bow did not need Leo's help, he still was not as aggressive as he usually is toward the dog. His focus was more on the mowers, and he did not seem to be able to decide whether he wanted to court them or warn them. In the video above, the gently rocking up and down dance that Bow initially does on top of the bench is not an aggressive move. He does break into a kind of display afterwards, but it, too, is less aggressive than usual, and you can see that he has no problem with Leo, showing only friendly regard to the dog, while he worries about the "mower problem."
Later, the head mower came in the house, and Bow said hello to him. He has known the man many years and actually seems to like him. He's just not crazy about the machinery that is used to mow the grass and the noise it makes.
When the mower and Bow were communing, I mentioned to him that the next plant about to bloom by the lagoon was the yucca, and I needed the poison ivy cleared away from around it, so I could admire the blossoms. Only just at that moment, I could not remember what the yucca plant was called. So I fumbled around for words to describe it, and here's what came out: "Spiky leaves. Tall tower of flowers. Cactus." Now, I knew that was wrong when it came out of my mouth. A yucca is not at all a cactus. But I needed a fast way to say what I wanted, and I could not think of the right classification: succulent. However, this shorthand, inexact description was good enough for the mower, and he got the job done! It's funny how faulty phylogenetic classification is good enough to communicate with another human being.
Poison ivy spreads everywhere, and I am allergic to it, so I have been trying to think of ways to get rid of it that would not harm the other plants. The last time we spoke, the mower said that he had heard of a spray that gets rid of poison ivy. But on further inquiry, he informed me yesterday, that spray would kill everything else, too. "Well, we don't want that," I commented. And he agreed.
In the evening, I enjoyed resuming my favorite walk on the newly mown trail. I got to see flowers that have only just now bloomed on either side of the path.
However, I saw no new wildlife until I got back to the mowed portion of the yard.
I spotted a rabbit from afar. But the rabbit disappeared into the underbrush by the lagoon, and then I heard a sound and saw a deer leap across my fence, and into the neighbors' field. I went toward the fence line to look.
The deer stood there for a while looking at me and twitching its tail, so that I wondered whether it was waiting for a companion to follow. But when no one else came, it went into the woods.
And just as the deer disappeared, I heard some rustling from the underbrush by the lagoon. I thought it was the rabbit coming out again. But no, it was an armadillo!
The armadillo did not seem to be aware at first that I was watching him. He went out to the newly mown grass and started digging at once.
I wanted to get a better look at its face, but when I drew closer it suddenly noticed me and initiated a program of armadillo evasive maneuvers, which are quite different from rabbit evasive maneuvers.
He went straight for the woods and took a very short break there. After taking a short rest among the cypress spurge plants at edge of the woods, he continued on his way in a more or less straight line trajectory -- no zig-zagging for him -- until he hid for a while under the storage building.
The armadillo did not stay there for long, though. Soon I could see that he had crawled out from under the storage building and was going as fast as he could toward the barn, where he seemed to think he would be able to take shelter. However, no sooner had he gone into the barn than he came out again. I think the kitten scared him away! I watched as he went into the woods by the barn and pursued him no further.
The coming of the mowers causes a temporary disruption in the normal flow of events around here, but that subsides pretty fast. The grass starts to grow again. The wildlife goes back to its usual habits, and so do the rest of us. This morning, Bow was displaying aggressively at Leo again, and Leo was bounding up in the air and barking at him. Everything is back to normal.
It has been very cool lately. At lunch yesterday I was wearing a jacket. I decided to give Bow only my pinkie to spell with.
Bow was discouraged at first, and he took a break from his spelling to gaze despondently at the windy landscape through the the front door. But then he took up the task and asked for an apple.
Things went more smoothly when Bow requested his meat dish, which was actually the main course for lunch. He finished the entire meal, and then the mowers came.
Bow gets very excited whenever he sees the mowers. He watched them for a while through the front door window.
When he had tired of watching them from the inside, he took my pinkie and spelled בואי אתי החוצה -- "Come outside with me!"
This is very different from what he usually says when he wants to go outside. Usually he just writes "Let me go outside." But apparently this time he wanted my company.
While the mowers mowed, Brownie took some time to dig a nice big hole in the back yard.
Bow was pretty complacent at this point, and I was able to leave him for a moment out there and pick my daughter up from school, as the bus did not run locally yesterday for some reason. By the time I got back, Bow was ready to come in, and the grass was already mowed.
In the evening, we had a beautiful sunset. If you look closely at the front lawn in the picture above, you can see that it is freshly mown. The wildflowers that sprang up there are gone, but their memories live on.
It's nice to be snug as a bug in a rug at home, and to be able to contemplate the inside of one's mouth -- to think inward thoughts.
Bow has the luxury of doing just that for as long as he likes. But he also likes to go outside and brave the elements.
Yesterday morning, it was windy and cold and it looked as if a storm was approaching.
We seemed on the verge of a storm.
Every direction you looked, it looked as if something big was about to happen in the sky.
Bow went inside and then went out again, and as a way to keep warm, he displayed.
Leo obliged Bow by engaging him, while Brownie remained aloof.
But there was no storm. Things settled down. In the afternoon, as I was going for my regular walk, I spotted a dog going into my pasture, entering from the road into the bushy underbrush. I decided to pretend that I did not see that, because the last thing I wanted was a confrontation about neighbor dogs on my property. Maybe if I ignored the dog, the dog would ignore me.
But he didn't ignore me. He came right up and greeted me as if we were old friends, and for a moment I was disoriented, and I thought he looked just like my old dog Osiris, who was born near Harrison, Arkansas and whose photo is always on my mantel. He died before I went to grad school.
Bow looks at a photo of Osiris
But then I realized it was just Cowboy. the neighbor dog. And Cowboy wanted to join me in my walk. I didn't invite him, but when he saw that I was going for a walk on my mowed path, he decided he would lead the way.
Just to be certain he didn't lose me, Cowboy kept turning back to make sure I was still on the path.
What I found most interesting was the way he stuck to the path, when he could easily have gone exploring in the underbrush. If you did not know any better, you might have been convinced that he had been trained not to leave the well-trodden path. However, that was not the case. When we parted ways, he went to explore the brambles and the narrow footways the deer and rabbits and coyotes had made among the trees and bushes. It was just that as long as we were keeping company, he understood that I would not stray from the path, so neither did he.
If we were in an American city, Cowboy, with no apparent collar or tags, would be considered a stray. But since we are living in the country, people know who he is and where he lives, and since he does not cause any harm, he is tolerated. Even I tolerate him, because he does not go near the fence to tease my dogs, the way some latchkey dogs have been known to do when their masters are away.
Should dogs be allowed to roam? It's a question that I've thought about before. In Taiwan, even in the cities, there are stray dogs who are well behaved and well fed, even though they are not owned.
Feral dogs, people will warn you, can form packs and attack livestock, other dogs and even people. I know this, not just because I have been told, but because I have seen it out here with my own eyes, before there was even a "shelter" in this county. Dogs got shot when they broke the rules.
I don't let my own dogs roam, just as I would never allow Bow to go out under the present conditions. I am a very cautious person. But I can't help but feel that when we get used to a certain context, such a society that is intolerant of stray dogs and stray children and homeless people, we are moving one step closer to our own imprisonment and that of our children.
Stray dogs and stray children used to be the hallmark of every human city, and while their presence was sometimes an eyesore and a nuisance, I would rather see them roam free than all get institutionalized and/or adopted. I would rather see dogs adopting humans than humans adopting dogs. Brownie, for instance, chose us.
Cowboy reminded me yesterday that a dog out on his own can be well behaved and trustworthy, and that it takes a certain type of community to allow us to see that this, too, is a possibility.
I was taking it easy this morning, while Bow lounged around in the outer pen. The last thing I wanted was to deal with another snake. But the dogs gave the alarm, and Bow got very excited, too. This time, the snake was not nearly as aggressive as the one we met before. Rather than attacking anyone who approached, it was engaged in mostly defensive maneuvers. I was able to get it into my plastic container with very little trouble. In fact, I think the snake cooperated with me. Brownie tried to tug at the tail that was not in the container, but the snake tucked itself inside and allowed me to secure the lid.
'
I showed the snake to Bow, who was leaning forward in the pen, eager to see. The dogs milled around me, but they accepted that the snake was mine to do with as I pleased, since I had captured it.
The snake seemed very relaxed within the container. It was not making any gestures that indicated a desire to attack.
I took the snake to the front yard near the pasture and opened the lid. At first the snake did not move at all, and I was concerned that it might have been asphyxiated.
However, when I prodded it with the tongs, it did move.
It had a very stern, but non-threatening expression. At no point did it attempt to strike out at me. The behavior of this snake is what I associate with black rat snakes in general, as I have handled many of them over the years. I would not attempt to handle a snake that I don't feel comfortable with.
Eventually, I tipped the container over and allowed the snake to make its way through the grass to the pasture.
If all goes well for this snake, it will capture and eat many rodents.
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