When the Cat's Away

Nile the cat is missing. He has been gone for over three days. Here is the last picture I took of him.

I believe I saw him on the 19th during the day, but when I went to the barn to feed him, he was nowhere in sight. Usually, he accompanies me from somewhere close to the house to where I insist on feeding him, in the barn, far away from where we live.

But on the way to feed Nile, I saw rabbits. They bounded away as I walked by. I had not seen rabbits in months, so somehow this betokened the cat's absence from the property.

I sent my daughter out to look for him and to call him the following evening, when he had been missing for a day. He did not show up.

The day after that, Cowboy the neighbor dog suddenly joined me on my walk, which is something he had not done in a while. For a moment, I asked myself whether Cowboy could have had anything to do with Nile's disappearance, but I decided that it was probably the other way around. Now that Nile was no longer around, Cowboy felt free to come visit again. Nile used to hiss at Cowboy.

Yesterday, when I went out for a walk, I saw a long, black rat snake on its way to my door.

The snake's head was very close to the front step, but its tail was curled all the way around the corner of the house.

They say that when the cat's away, the mice will play. Well, I have not seen any mice, but perhaps they are out playing. This seems to be what the black rat snake is thinking.

When I returned from my walk, I thought for a moment that the black rat snake must have gone away, until I saw it draped on the stone wall by the entrance.

I do not suspect the black rat snake of killing Nile the cat. Nile was much too big for him. But I do think the snake is taking advantage of the cat's absence to fill in the same ecological niche.

The deer, on the other hand, seem more cautious today. They had grazed in the front yard, completely unafraid of the cat. But today, they peered at me from the pasture, and then they sneaked into the part of the yard where I cannot see them through the window. When they saw they had been spotted after all, they turned tail and ran.

Bow has not offered any observations on the absence of Nile the cat. He was never too fond of him.

We had a plan as to where Nile would live in November, once it got too cold to stay out. This plan would have also involved getting him fixed. Perhaps he got wind of our plan and made different plans of his own. Wherever he is, I hope he is happy and well.

Observing the Rabbits

With Lawrence away, Bow and I are pretty much on our own, and we are left without too much external company. But people do still come by. On Friday the lady from the store brought over some bananas and some apples for Bow. She also stopped to chat. "I had to be careful not to run over all those bunnies you have on your property," she said. I knew what she meant. The rabbits on my property tend to run in zigzags on the road every time a car drives by. It seems to make it more likely that they will get run over than if they simply moved out of the way, but they have their own reasons for acting that way.

I asked her if she had that many rabbits on her property, and she said that she had a cat, so there were fewer rabbits. But on my land the rabbits are proliferating, and they act in strange and mysterious ways. They don't simply run away when you chase them. They lead you on a merry dance.

The above is a four minute video that I took maybe a week ago, but it took me all day yesterday to upload. There were three rabbits out and visible at the start, but the littlest rabbit ran north, and the other two took turns leading me on a merry chase. Why didn't they just run straight for the woods in order to lose me? What were they actually thinking?

My daughter asked me the other day why I keep chasing the rabbits. Did I want to catch and tame them? No, of course not. I have my hands full with Bow. I want to learn to understand the rabbits, not to possess or to change them.

But, unlike the Animal Rights Activists I know, I don't want to tell other people what they should do with their rabbits. Some people keep rabbits for pets. Some people raise rabbits for meat. Some hunt rabbits, and some wear rabbit fur coats. And I think all of that is okay, if they are doing it with their own rabbits on their own land. What I would dearly object to would be someone entering on my land and doing it to my rabbits.

I think it is great that there are ethologists who study chimpanzees in the wild. What is not so great is when those ethologists declare that chimpanzees should exist only in the wild or in sanctuaries. It is not good at all that these ethologists start dictating exactly what should be done to or with chimpanzees, as if there were only one way to live.

I feel the same way about humans, by the way. There are wild humans who have not yet learned to count. Should we round them all up and force them into a modern school? I think that would be sad. But by the same token, this does not mean that I want to tell all parents not to send their children to school.

There is more than one way to be. You can be a wild rabbit. You can be a wild chimp. You can be a wild human. Or you can be domesticated. Who should choose? Those born wild, should be left alone, unless they choose civilization.

Those of us born domesticated, like Bow and me, need to be left alone to live our domestic life. Unless, of course, we find a way to become wild again.

 Most of us recognize that missionaries and social workers are not always the best influence on indigenous populations. But it is hard to interact with others without interfering. And lots of bad things can happen when cultures clash. When someone from the outside comes and says "Let me help you" one has to be wary. We have to ask, is this help going to make us happier? Or is it going to make us more like him?

 

Keeping Things in Balance

Yesterday I finally surprised the rabbit by the blooming phlox. It must have been right there underfoot when I went to look at the flowers. I didn't see it flee, but I felt a big whoosh close by. Had that been a bird? No, too big for a bird. So I looked, and there it was in the underbrush between the flower beds.

This is a cropped version of the original  picture. My friend Jerilee helped me crop it.

The rabbit stood stock still for a good long while. It gave me enough time to both snap a picture and also shoot a very brief video.

Notice that after the rabbit hopped away, it did not go far. It was still there in sight, just a little deeper into the underbrush. I decided the wise course of action would be not to try to follow. I panned the camera so you could see just how close we were to the blooming phlox.

My house is surrounded by fields and woods, and lately we have been seeing lots and lots of rabbits. "There are too many of them," my daughter recently remarked, as several of them ran away on either side of our long driveway when we were going for a drive. "Someone should go hunting."

Someone probably will go hunting. It might be a coyote or better yet a fox.

In Case There's a Fox

I have never seen a fox on my property in all the years that I have lived here. But that does not mean that there isn't one. In fact, by making my land so hospitable to rabbits, I am inviting a fox to come live here. Why? Because foxes love rabbits. They are delicious!

Do I say this because I dislike rabbits? Not at all. One of my favorite books is Watership Down. I can very well imagine myself living the life of a rabbit. But then I can turn around and also imagine being a fox. I think the presence of the fox is as much a service to the rabbits as the presence of the rabbits is a service to the fox. We all need each other, and the circle of life depends on a delicate balance between predator and prey.

Without rabbits and other small prey, the foxes would starve, Without foxes and other predators, the rabbits would get fat and sick and overpopulate the land and die of starvation. They need each other, as all living things on this planet do.

Some people think they are very enlightened because one day when they are fully grown they suddenly  realize that the burger on their plate used to be a cow. But I think that someone who did not find this out until he was an adult must have led a very sheltered life. True enlightenment is the realization that the cow would never have existed at all, would never have been out in the field grazing and experiencing mother love or companionship or any other joyful  aspect of life, if not for the people who were raising it as food.

Balance is a difficult concept. It requires countervailing forces. It is based on conflict of interest. It means there will never be total peace, but a delicate balance of power prevents all out war from destroying everything.

Everyone Gets a Say and No One Will Eat the Carrots

Of course, Bow is not the only one in our family who has mood swings or who feels the need to express himself.

 In this video from two days ago, Brownie and Leo got to chime in, and each of them had a say. Notice how tolerant Bow is of their self-expression.

Leo is the youngster, and he has so much energy that he can spend hours barking at a squirrel who is up in  a tree/ Brownie is the older of the two dogs, and sometimes he just complains. Although we don't know exactly how old he is, he must be at least nine by now. Here is a link to an article that explains how we got him.

http://aya-katz.hubpages.com/hub/Love-and-Commitment-and-Chimpanzee

When there are rabbits on the other side of the fence, both dogs tend to notice. They regard the rabbits as trespassers.

On Tueday evening, as I was backing out of the driveway, I spotted a rabbit by the fence.

Though this picture makes the rabbit seem quite far away, it's the closest I have gotten to any of the wild rabbits on my land, and it almost seemed as if I could reach out and touch it.

At first I tried filming the rabbit from the window of the car, then I rolled down the window and eventually I tried to exit the car and get closer, but between the barking and my car's annoying alarm, the rabbit was scared away pretty fast. When I returned from shopping that evening, I saw the three rabbits I know, the big one, the medium one and the small one, run into the woods single file, smallest first and biggest last.

After this close encounter, I decided to leave some baby carrots for the rabbits outside. But it's been two days. and nobody has eaten those carrots! I have also not seen any of the rabbits since then. Do you think maybe I offended them by offering store-bought food?

What is wrong with those carrots, anyway? Bow won't eat them, either. Provisioning wildlife is much harder than people make it seem. What grows on my land naturally is apparently much better than what I can buy at the store. And the rabbits, the turtles, the squirrels, the birds and Bow are all in on some secret about these carrots that I don't know.

Bow is very tolerant of my blind ignorance. I don't notice what he thinks is obvious. Sometimes Bow asks me to move aside so he can have more room to display, as happened in the video above from yesterday.

This morning, I had to go mow the grass in the backyard. The dogs wanted to play. Brownie was so into the game of fetch-the-rock that he acted like a very young puppy.

Leo, who does not come pre-wired with the fetch gene, just barks a lot when we play. His enjoyment of the fetch-game is entirely vicarious.

I did eventually mow the grass, as you can see by the evidence on the mower. I think the rabbits in the fields might actually appreciate the remains of grass on the mower better than they like the carrots that I left them out back. Too bad I can't get them to come clean the mower  -- or better yet, trim the grass in the backyard, when the dogs are asleep indoors at night.

Three Rabbits and a Turtle

This morning I encountered the same three rabbits that I saw the other day. They behaved in pretty much the same way as before, though I approached them a little differently. When they first scattered, I didn't notice the tiny one. So I went after the two big ones right away. And this time the bigger of the two thought it would start that slow chase first.

However, when I finished with the first rabbit, I noticed that the other one was still lingering and watching.

Once the smaller of the two rabbits had disappeared, I decided to go check by the pine tree where I has seen the tiny rabbit last time. Even though I had not seen it run for cover this time, I had a hunch that it would go there, because there is something a little predictable to this rabbit behavior.

Sure enough, the tiny rabbit was there. When I first spotted it, it was chewing on grass, unconcerned, even though it must have seen me. But as I got closer, as usual, it ran away.

As if those were not enough wildlife sightings for the morning, after I went back inside I saw a three-toed box turtle going for a stroll on my sidewalk. I could see him clearly through the window of my front door. Now why would a turtle choose the sidewalk, which is made of cement, over the green grass of the overgrown lawn?

I immediately set out to investigate. The turtle looked familiar, and I must have seemed familiar, too, for it was not nearly as shy as one might have expected.

It was hard to get a really good shot that was centered, because by the time I did that, the legs had been retracted.

Eventually, walking away seemed like the best option, and so the turtle went off on his own, abandoning the sidewalk and disappearing into the grass.

I love to watch turtles walk, so I followed at a discreet distance.

When they are walking they show how very long their neck is, with their head held high/

Is this a new turtle who just happened to be friendly? Or are the animals on my property getting used to me?

Rabbit Strategies

Yesterday, I spotted a dragonfly on the barbed wire fence that separates my land from the neighbors'.

Later in the day, all the hay in the field on the other side of the fence was mown and in bails.

I don't know whether this activity was disturbing to local rabbits, but it just so happened that yesterday evening, after putting Bow to bed, I had a much closer encounter with rabbits than ever before.

As I was walking down my road in the direction of the woods, I encountered several rabbits, who scattered and ran. One little one ran to the north, and at least two others went south. There they stopped, and I could see them waiting to see what would happen next. I went to look at the smaller rabbit first. It was not full grown. I wanted so much to get a good picture of it, but it ran away as I got close.

I then turned back to the two rabbits who were still watching and waiting on the other side of my internal road. I decided to approach them from the direction of the woods, so it would be harder for them to run for cover right away.

The first and closer rabbit ran off toward the woods almost at once. But the other one lingered. It waited for me to get a good look, then led me on a slower chase. Every once in a while the rabbit would pause and wait for me to catch up. Then as I approached, it would hop away again. It was leading me away from where the other rabbit had gone.

I don't know the relationship among the rabbits that I saw, but clearly their actions were coordinated and each rabbit had its own role to play.