I have to admit I really miss all the wildlife of our former home. It's quite the reversal from a year ago when we were packing to move. At times it seemed like we were being run out of town less by financial circumstances and more by the critters that had laid siege to the house.
People think of LA as a strictly urban experience but the truth is great chunks of the city back up on untamed land. No one gives that much thought when they move into the fringes. We certainly didn't when we bought our house in the Hollywood Hills.
It all seemed somewhat charming and romantic at first, the hawks gracefully circling overhead, the distant howl of coyotes in the dead of the night. But you soon discover much of the wilderness experience revolves around death and that distant howl in the night means something has just been killed.
And odds are it was Fluffy from down the street.
The gracefully circling hawks will suddenly dive down and then you'd see them fly off with lifeless Thumper in their talons.
What little I knew about wildlife I learned from Looney Toons, so we were woefully unprepared for our new life in the hills. We were about to be schooled, and quick. The first day, in fact, when a two point buck leapt in front of our car on a canyon road just below Mulholland and almost sent us careening down into a ravine. Welcome to the neighborhood, clueless humans!
We'd only lived there a week when I took the dogs out for a walk. The boyfriend had to get up at 5am for work, and once he was up, everyone was up. We set off in the pre-dawn darkness, the morning fog making visibility even worse. As we walked up a neighboring street, I glanced to the left and saw a house cat approaching us. "What a friendly cat" I thought.
And big too.
It was little more than a silhouette in the fog, maybe 12 feet away, when something spooked it and it turned tail and ran. As we continued on our way and headed for home, I ran into one of our new neighbors retrieving his paper.
"You're a much braver man than I, walking your dogs in the dark..." he said. I must have looked puzzled because he quickly added "... because of the mountain lion." It seems that there was a mountain lion that periodically hunted in the neighborhood. It had disappeared for quite a while but had recently returned. We had just met it.
The coyotes were a bit of a disappointment the first time the dogs and I ran into them. They were much smaller than I expected and skittish too. At the first sight of us they scattered. What's the big deal?
They were babies.
The adults were a little more fearsome and brave. One morning the dogs inexplicably decided to sleep in, so I stepped into the backyard for a breakfast smoke. As I stood there with my coffee I got the uneasy feeling I was being watched. I scanned the yard and the back slope and saw nothing. But the feeling persisted and I looked around again, and this time looked up. There on the roof was a coyote as big as a German Shepard, eyes glowing like a movie werewolf. Our house backed to the hill and it was an easy two foot jump to the roof. Evidently our house was a perfect vantage point to keep watch on the street. And so it was on sleepless nights, coyotes pacing six feet overhead.
And then there were the poor birds. Our house was something like "blood alley" for the birds. The living room had 15 foot walls of glass, which was news to the birds. The sickening "thud" of the birds hitting the windows became fairly routine. When they weren't dying to get into the house, they were dying to get out having flown through an open slider. The dogs of course thought it was very exciting and fun and it turned into a grim game of "keep away" seeing who could get to them first. I did develop one unique skill - rescuing hummingbirds. For some strange reason I was able to snatch them in mid-flight and get them outside before they killed themselves smacking into the windows.
The raccoons were cute. At first. We didn't see them for the longest time, only knowing they were there by odd sounds and rustling on the back hill. But then one day up popped the most adorable face, just like in a Disney film. And then another, and another... it was a mother and four babies. How cute is that? There was only one thing to do, we thought...
Feed them!
So we started tossing up kibble. They may have been cute, but they were also ungrateful, and soon the kibble simply wasn't enough. They took to our plants, the cypress trees in particular, and proceeded to eat them like ears of corn, starting at the bottom and working their way up until there was nothing left but a stalk.
But at least they were harmless, to us anyway. There were other things to scare us witless.
The boyfriend and I each have but one phobia, spiders for him, snakes for me. Imagine how pleased he was when our next door neighbor knocked on the door to show off the 5 inch tarantula she'd just caught in a jar. Found in her garden? No! Her dining room! He rarely went outside after that. And how happy was I to discover our street was known locally as "the snake street", for all the rattlesnakes that apparently called it home. I never saw a live one, but starting in Spring I'd start finding them flattened on the road, each one a little closer to our house. One day firetrucks showed up at the neighbor's house. I saw firemen bounding up her stairs, but didn't see them unload any equipment. There wasn't any smoke, so what was the deal?
SNAKE!
They came down a few minutes later with a six foot rattlesnake, dead and draped on a rake.
The house was already for sale at the time, but if it wasn't, it would've been after that.
The final straw for us was the gophers. They actually do look exactly like they do in cartoons. We didn't know that at first. Mysterious mounds of dirt started cropping up in the backyard. What were they? Ant hills? But then the plants on the back hillside started tumbling into the yard, stripped of all their roots. They decimated almost everything and then set their sights on the big kahunas, huge ancient agave plants as big as Yugos. We had dozens of them and they had been there since before the house was built in the 50's. They were massive. But while they had stood the test of time, they were no match for the gophers and soon they were crashing down the hill too.
The whole hillside was quickly turning into a moonscape, and with nothing left to eat back there, they started moving around to the front of the house. We noticed a mound pop up next to a large crack in the driveway, and as we stood there examining it, the nasty little head of a gopher popped up. The boyfriend was incensed and went and grabbed a hose. He jammed it down the hole and cranked it to full blast. We'd drown him, the little bastard. And his little friends too. So we stood there and waited for the water to back up, a sign we had flooded their little domain.
And waited.
And waited.
For 20 minutes we let the hose go all out and it never backed up. The house was resting on top of an entire gopher city.
So, as sad as I was to lose the house, I took some comfort in knowing the wilderness nightmare was ending.
But then we moved to Bako, and there is absolutely nothing wild here.
Nothing.
Some birds, sure, the few not done in by the heat and pesticide. But that's about it. And now I find I miss it, the animals and the danger.
So as I want the dogs around our blandly safe neighborhood, we occasionally come across a house cat and I'll think back to the one that almost ate us.
And smile.
