Cabin Journal

Life, Death and Joy in the Animal World

All winter, I watched a flock of wild turkeys trot across my front yard on their way to my neighbor’s place, where she put out food for them. In March, I was lucky enough to witness the males perform their courtship rituals—flashing their tail feathers in front of the females. Then in April, when the snow began to melt, I noticed turkey feathers all over the yard but was puzzled as to how they got there: do turkeys molt in the spring?

But the story turned out to be sadder and more unexpected. One of the female turkeys, my neighbor told me, had some kind of disfigurement and was shunned by the others. As part of nature’s plan, a bobcat took advantage of her vulnerability. Her fate was written in the snow. My neighbor saw the bobcat tracks and the signs of something being dragged. Those feathers around my cabin were a testament of how nature works: predator and prey.

In March, I saw other evidence of nature’s seeming cruelty. All winter long, when most of the wildlife is hibernating, the rabbits were still out, hopping across the snow and leaving tracks by the front porch, under which they took refuge. But in March, the rabbits disappeared. I miss them, their softness and gentleness, but I know a bobcat had a meal that helped it to survive.

But the rabbits’ and turkey’s demise is easier to understand than the death of a moose calf a few weeks ago. When it was still alive, the young animal was photographed at Lily Lake, just down the road from me, and its picture appeared on the front cover of the local newspaper. (My photo of a moose calf, above, was taken several years ago at Lily Lake.) But a neighbor told me that she saw its dead body, a few days later, by the side of the road near the lake, presumably mowed down by a car.

I’ve driven that road many times, and people drive it fast, oblivious to the fact that wildlife lives alongside and cross it: deer, elk, chipmunks and other animals. Driving it once at dusk, I had a car on my bumper the whole time, and when I slowed because I saw a deer on the side of the road, the car started to pass me until I honked, and the driver stopped just in time to avoid hitting the deer when it stepped into the road.

It’s hard to see any animal die, but even harder to endure the obliviousness of humans to the animal world, especially when our need to get someplace fast comes before respect for their lives.

Luckily for river otters, their way of life keeps them from (mostly) having to cross paths with humans, although that wasn’t always true. Hunted in most states almost to extinction for their fur, they were reintroduced in Colorado decades ago and have slowly been  making a comeback. I first saw one about eight years ago in Wild Basin, when it popped out of a hole in the ice and quickly dove back into the frigid water when it saw me.  

But last week, I was not only lucky enough to see an otter again, but to witness the animal do something I had read about but never seen. Sitting at Copeland Falls in Wild Basin, out of the corner of my eye, I saw something move. I turned my head just in time to see the otter jump onto a snow bank and slide maybe 30 feet into the river. It looked like an act of pure joy, and after it spotted me watching it, the otter went farther downstream, where I followed it, and found another (shorter) snowbank to slide down. (I didn't move fast enough to get a picture of the sliding otter, but I did photograph the track it left behind, to the left of the waterfall.)

Although its survival was based on catching fish, it was having fun doing it. I watched the otter dive into the water over and over, although I never saw it catch its meal. More than anything, I wanted to be that otter, wanted to slide down the snowbank and become part of the river, make my way around the boulders and over the waterfalls, plunging over and over again into this creek. At that moment, I couldn’t imagine anything more fun.

In a world full of anger and loss, where often there is more pain than pleasure, it’s a treat to find pure joy. I envied the otter and its long leap into the river, where it’s at home among the boulders, waterfalls and deep pools.  Unfortunately, I probably wouldn’t survive a swim in the river, but I might be able to find a good snowbank to slide down.

Stock photo above by Zachary Spears on Unsplash.

After the Fire, New Life

Hiking the Fern Lake trail, it’s still a shock to see the burned tree limbs, the empty spaces where trees went up in smoke, and the charred black ground a year and a half after the East Troublesome wildfire roared through this area of Rocky Mountain National Park. Whole groves of aspen are completely gone and the blackened skeletons of ponderosa lay on the ground. You can tell that the junipers burned the hottest, because the black circles surrounding them are lifeless.

Yet, as spring comes to the mountains, there is also new growth. The yellow grape holly spreads across the barren hillsides, and a few barrel cactus are flowering, either having survived the fire or regrowing from deep roots.  New grasses are pushing up among last year’s dead ones, and in the puddles from the melting snow I find moss growing on rocks.

On the steep slope where the 2013 flood cleared out trees and bushes, and then the fire cleaned out anything left, I saw small ponderosa pines growing, maybe four feet high. From what I can find, ponderosas grow at a rate of  12-18 inches a year. Is it possible these pines started growing after the fire?

Most of the willow bushes in this open valley were destroyed, but I see new shoots coming up, adding some color—yellow and red—to this dark landscape, which is almost unrecognizable in places. With so many trees gone, it’s more open, so from the trail I can see the river across a now open field. And without the trees and bushes, the boulders are no longer obscured but are revealed in all their grandeur—the myriad different shapes, textures and colors. I can see how the orange and green lichen blend with the blue and gray tints of these angular rocks.  

After the wildfire burned the outer bark of the aspen trees, what’s left is the yellow outlines of these elegant trees, a bright light in the darkness (below). Similarly, with their needles burnt, the architecture of the junipers is exposed: the intertwined golden and brown limbs and branches (above).  

I read that ponderosa pines’ thick bark protects them from fire. So even if the tree looks dead—the blackened trunk and the orange needles— underneath the outer bark, nutrients and water can still be transported from the ground to the branches. These ponderosas might yet survive to see another year.

Hiking in another part of the park this week, Wild Basin, I noticed that, without fires to clean out the underlying dead brush and downed trees, the forest looks messy and is prone to more severe wildfires. In contrast, on the Fern Lake trail, the fire has opened up the landscape, so sunlight is better able to penetrate and activate new growth—of grasses, flowers, aspens and  pines.  

Although the fire itself was unnatural—leaping over the treeless tundra—I have to appreciate that I’m watching a natural cycle, even a destructive one: the death of one ecosystem, a rearranging of the natural landscape, and then new growth. It's not just an ending but a new beginning.