Wild Suburbia

A few weeks ago we took another trip to our home in Buffalo to finalize work on the house and the yard before the new renters moved in. I am always lamenting that one day my home will be in suburbia and away from the wilder setting of the Cape, however, perhaps I should not despair, for of course, there is a good deal of wildlife that has made the switch to suburbia also.

While my husband tends to the interior work, I have the joy of working the outside. 10 hours of working the outside, for one thing renters do not do, is weed and here the soil is rich enough to grow thistles with trunks the size of Sequoias. And our “grass”, which is probably 10% grass and 90% clover, birds foot trefoil, wild strawberry, Creeping Charlie, etc. was way overgrown, at least by the neighbors standard of 1” perfectly, perfect Scott's cover lawns.

But here is where the cool part of intersecting with nature came in. As soon as I fired up the lawn mower and started cutting, a pair of barn swallows showed up, and like a scene from a Disney movie swooped and flew right along with me as I went back and forth.
Did I have some sort of bird charm working? Did they mistake me for Cinderella in need of a gown for the ball? No, they were simply opportunistic birds. As I passed back and forth over this conglomerate of plants, I was scaring up moths and other flying insects that were instantly snatched up by the swallows. Amazing how they nailed them 90% of the time. And for the most part the moths never saw it coming. And yet, one or two moths, either by coincidence or perhaps picking up a SOS pheromone from the others who had met a sad fate, flew in a straight line, unusual for moths, straight ahead and out of the yard and they were the ones that made it. Also might have been a coincidence but interesting all the same. It’s a large yard, so I would run out of gas, and the swallows would disappear, only to return the second I fired it up again. How cool is that! So even though it took me close to 2 hours to finish the mowing, I was entertained throughout.

We also do a lot of trimming of bushes etc. when we go and when we first got there I thought, what untrained gardener decided to prune the Hostas? Whoever it was they did a horrible job, and who prunes Hostas anyway? Ah…deer prune Hostas without much thought as to what the final job will look like, so out the kitchen window now is a row of normal Hostas and a row of chewed up ones. Deer browse is recognizable by the fact that they leave a ragged looking bite for they only have front teeth on their bottom jaw.

When we got back home we got an email from our old renters saying their son would miss seeing the deer with the injured leg that would come and dine at the window. Ah, helping the handicap, guess he can help himself and we shall just have to hope the new renters are as empathetic.

Here on the Cape, as you know, the dog and I head out for an off-leash walk around a bog each day, or now that it is summer, go over to swim at the nearby pond, where, floating on my back, I can watch osprey and swallows and dragonflies do their hunting. In Buffalo it is, of course, a leash walk and probably that is the single most dreaded thing for me about living there. Not the harsh winters, I like snow, but a dog that must be on a leash. Still, by then he will be old and perhaps a slow stroll will suit him. But again, it wasn’t as without excitement as I thought. Each morning, we headed out at dawn, and each morning in the small patch of woods that remain at the end of the street, we encountered a trio of deer, and each morning I about had my arm yanked out of the socket by a dog delirious to join the chase. Beside the deer, in the entrance to the woods there must have been 9 separate woodchuck holes. They were all pretty close together, so either this is the woodchuck version of a trophy home, or a family that normally would spread out, have been forced to live village style, taking a cue from prairie dogs perhaps! This whole area was farmland not that long ago, and so all these species were present and seem now to be managing to remain, thanks to a supply of Hosta and grass and, I imagine, vegetable gardens nearby.

So, perhaps my dread of a lifeless suburbia is unfounded. Besides, after frying for a few years in Texas, I am sure moving to Buffalo will seem like moving to the Rain Forest by comparison. And as I hate the heat, I have also decided I will gladly go garden there each June when the renters move out. For that matter, next year I anticipate it will take me about three months to complete the weeding! Yes, suburbia may not be so bad after all!