Creek House Wildlife #3: The Ones You Sometimes See

Overhead, you can at least point a camera. The owl in the tulip tree, the hawk on the thermal, the whole loud circus at the feeder: they live up in the branches, out where the light gets to them, and if you’re patient (and lucky, and quick) you can sometimes catch them.

The ground is a different negotiation. The ground has its own residents, and most of them have no interest in being seen, photographed, or acknowledged in any way. You come to know them the way you know an old house has mice: by evidence. By the things they leave behind.

I do have one advantage down here that I don’t have with the owls: a full-time research assistant on the ground floor. His name is Remy, he’s a pit bull, and he holds strong, specific, and frequently incorrect opinions about every animal in this essay. (You’ve met Remy.) If you want to know what’s moving through the yard on a given day, you don’t need a trail cam. You need to watch the dog.

Take the deer. The deer are everywhere, and they are the nemesis of my garden; they’re the reason I’ve given up on growing hostas anywhere on this property, having already donated several years’ worth to their cause. Remy and the deer have what I’d call a chase/flee relationship, in which he chases and they flee and he considers this a tremendous personal victory and excellent cardio. Or he did. This spring a doe hid her fawn on the berm, and when Remy came trotting out for his usual game, she did not flee. She turned and faced him down. My brave, barrel-chested pittie discovered, in real time, that the rules had changed, and he’s been a little cowed around the deer ever since. Humbled by a mother his own size defending something smaller than either of them. There’s a lesson in there and I think he’s still working on it. These days we’re on the second generation of deer raised with Zach and Remy walking the creek three or four times a day, and they don’t even look up anymore. Zach pointed it out the other day: the deer have stopped running. Remy has not been consulted about this.

The box turtles are gentler company: ancient and unhurried, turning up on the creek trail after a good rain like they’ve got an appointment they’re in no danger of being late for. Remy is TERRIFIED of them. I want to convey the scale of this fear accurately. The last time we met a box turtle on the trail, Remy attempted to climb Zach like a Warner Bros. character going up a lamppost, all four feet churning, and flatly refused to proceed until the turtle (moving at its customary one mile per hour) had been relocated off the path. Sixty pounds of dog, undone by a reptile he could outrun at a leisurely stroll if he simply chose to. He did not choose to.

The lizards don’t frighten anybody, least of all Remy, who has decided they’re beneath his notice. The anoles bask on the front concrete patio, flashing those bright pink throat fans at each other like tiny inflatable arguments. The skinks work the foundation and the flower pots, blue-striped when they’re young, and sometimes missing a tail, because a skink will drop its tail to save its life and grow a lesser one back later. I’ve got a photo of one of them (striped, tail long gone) sitting in one of my pots in early spring like he owns the place. Which, that early in the season, before I’ve planted a thing, he sort of does.

The rat snakes and grass snakes turn up too, and they trigger the old reptile part of my brain that flinches first and thinks second. The flinch is involuntary. The second thought, every time, is gratitude, because a rat snake in the garden is a rodent problem quietly solving itself, and I’ve decided to be a person who’s glad to see them. I’m mostly there. The flinch is a work in progress.

The chipmunks are the ground crew. They skip the feeder entirely and work the deck underneath it, cleaning up whatever the birds and squirrels fling overboard, and they’re gone the second you reach for a camera. This one held still exactly once.

And then there’s the mole, who I have never once seen and never expect to. I know the mole exclusively by his work: the raised tunnels ridging across the yard, the little volcano mounds of turned earth. The mole is a rumor I’m paying for in lawn damage. Somewhere under all of this is an animal I have no photograph of and no real proof of beyond the evidence of his tireless, invisible, faintly infuriating industry. I’ve made my peace with him. I didn’t have a choice.

Which brings me, finally, to the otters.

There are otters in the creek. I know this because Zach has seen them. I have not.

Let me sit in that for a second, because it’s been sitting in me. My own partner, on our own land, at our own creek, has watched otters (otters!) and I have stood in that exact spot a hundred times and seen water and rocks and my own reflection. He mentions it casually, the way you’d say the mail came. I’ve started to take it personally. The creek is withholding from me specifically, and it’s using my own household to rub it in.

So I’ve ordered a trail cam. It isn’t here yet, but when it arrives it’s going down by the water, aimed at the bank, running at first light and last light, because that’s when Zach says he sees them. If the otters won’t show themselves to me in person, I’ll simply lie in wait with technology until they incriminate themselves on camera. Whether that’s patience or pettiness I genuinely can’t tell you. On this piece of land, I’ve stopped being sure there’s a difference.

Here’s the thing I keep landing on, and this is the third time I’ve said it, so you know I mean it: this is not a yard. This is habitat. And real habitat doesn’t perform for you. It doesn’t line up for the camera. It keeps a good part of itself back, underfoot and underwater, out past the reach of the porch light, and it lets you know it’s there by tunnels and tracks and the word of a more patient witness. The best guests at this property are the ones I’ve never met. I take them on faith, and it turns out the faith is the good part.

But that camera is on its way. And if I get those otters, y’all will be the first to know, right after I tell Zach that I have proof and he doesn’t.