Natural History Mysteries

I am always telling children in my nature programs that to be a naturalist is to be a detective.  Clues abound in the natural world for those who have eyes to see them.  Seeing them doesn’t always mean we will understand what we are seeing, but we are curious about what we have seen.  What it indicates.  Ergo, other names like Curious Naturalist, Naturally Curious etc. are descriptive of what life is like for those of us who find our joy in wondering what the scene before us might imply.

This week has tossed up some “unsolved mysteries” in rapid succession.  I had only been back from Oregon a couple of days, when my morning walk with the dog brought me by an extremely recent “crime scene”.  A fawn, probably about 4 months old, had become the main repast for, whom?  My best educated guess would be a coyote. 

This is just a half-mile from my house, and I have said before I lament the absence of coyote signs here.  I saw far more coyote scats, coyote tracks, coyote sightings in my neighborhood on Cape Cod than here in the supposedly “Wild West”.  In this part of Texas we have the highest concentration of White tailed deer of anywhere else in North America, so the loss of a fawn really isn’t something to be too sad about.  Rather I rejoice with the predator who, for once, got a decent meal. 

Now, here was the mystery, not so much a “Who done it?” for I think a coyote is highly likely, but the next morning when I walked the same area I was all set to explore it more thoroughly, but the deer was gone, completely gone!  Now, perhaps adding an exclamation mark there was uncalled for, for often a catch will be eaten where it was felled, and the rest either cached, or at least dragged to a less conspicuous spot. 

Today, with better shoes on, the dog and I set out to look for some sign, maybe drag marks, or something that might show us where it was now.  And it is amazing how there was nothing there to show it had ever existed; no fur fragments, no scats, no blood, no nothing.  I’m not sure what to attribute that to.  

 The ground here is hard and rocky so tracks are a rare thing and, was it so fresh that no fur was dislodged?  Well, these are questions you perhaps wish I would ask myself silently.  But, I followed some of the deer trails through the junipers where I was lucky not to lose an eye to the many sharp lower branches, but I did finally find it.   Clearly it had been the main course over the last couple of days, and that’s good, “Waste not Want not”.  But now, I was looking all around for a scat; surely after such good eating, nature would have taken its course, but no luck.  That would have helped cinch the notion that it was a coyote.  Mountain lions have been seen here, but that is a wilder supposition.  So, cool; a mystery to work on, and to semi-solve.

Then, lo and behold, cutting through my own front yard, I notice what looks like a patch of ground that is vibrating, and wow!  Hundreds of Harvestmen (think Daddy Long legs) were having some sort of a major “Meet and Greet”.  So, let me do a little deducing on that, and a little research and come back with my hypothesis another day.   

 But I invite you join in in this Curious Naturalist life-the “Game is Afoot”, or more precisely, under foot!