Home Sweet Home

Wednesday, November 8, 2017

After getting home from that most recent camping trip, doing laundry, paying bills, cleaning out the truck and putting everything away, and then washing the truck, and getting settled back into my home again, I was happy to sit and enjoy my back patio with its birds and squirrels and flowers … and a new furry visitor (you’ll see her at the end of this post).

Photos above and below are of a Chestnut-backed Chickadee who held so perfectly still for the photographs that I was certain she was posing.

 

While tidying up my kitchen, I glanced out the kitchen window at the rockery and was quite surprised to see this.  She held so still that I almost didn’t see her.

She was sound asleep!  She swayed just a tiny bit … back and forth, back and forth … didn’t even blink an eye.  From the time I first spotted her, she was there for about eight minutes.  She finally blinked, obviously took a deep breath, fluffed her feathers, looked around a bit, and flew off.

The top of that rock where she was napping was only 14 inches off the ground.  I know that because I went outside and measured it after she left.  I was surprised she would sleep that close to the ground.

 

House finches … yes?

Steller’s Jays (cyanocitta stelleri) are common in the Pacific Northwest where I live, although I see them around my back patio only 3 or 4 times a week.  When these Jays do come around, the other birds continue to feed, but they also give the Steller’s Jays a wide berth.

Photo immediately above is a cropped and enlarged portion of the first Jay photo above, so you can see the two blue spots on its forehead.  In the future I’ll try to get a photo that’s in focus, but these folks move so fast!

 

One wonders what was being said here.

Dark-eyed (“Oregon”) Junco, junco hyemalis.

Lest you praise me too highly for my photographs of birds, rest assured I delete LOTS of the photos I take.  The two photos below are examples.

Zoom!

Whoosh!

And now let me tell you about the new furry visitor!

One evening after dinner, I was sitting in my recliner, reading a good book.  The only light in the room was from a floor lamp beside my chair as well as a tiny bit of light coming from the light over the kitchen stove in the other room.  It wasn’t fully dark yet outside, but it was dark dusk.  I finished the book and put it down, turned off the floor lamp, and sat in the darkness for a moment thinking about the book … when, hmmm, was there some motion outside?

Oh my word, where’s my camera?!

How beautiful!!

That was my first response.  And “oh oh, a skunk” was my second response.

But I stuck with my first response and didn’t panic, and continued to watch and take photos and make as little noise as possible.  The patio door was closed (as is evidenced by the reflection from that kitchen light on the glass in these photos), so I felt relatively safe … and I felt the skunk was safe from me too, since these things oft-times work both ways.

Thank goodness for a camera that could take photos in that low light and could adjust for the low light.  The photos here do look like there was more light than there actually was.

She took her time, leisurely sniffing and poking around.  She checked out the plants and the bird bath (sometimes called an inverted white bucket) and the planter box and the fence.  She was in no hurry, and I didn’t feel the need to hurry her.  I wasn’t afraid.  I was thoroughly enjoying seeing her and taking photos.  She just seemed curious and was absolutely no threat.

What a lovely tail.  What a gorgeous coat.

By and by, I wanted to turn my lights back on and do other things, but I wanted to make sure she left the premises safely.  I thought about how to encourage her to leave without risk to me (or to her).  I decided a peaceful request would be best.  (The same as I would appreciate from her if she were asking me to leave her territory.)

I unlatched the patio door as quietly as I could and VERY SLOWLY slid the door open just an inch or so.  I made clicking noises with my mouth … she paid no attention.  Maybe I was being too peaceful.  So I tapped very gently with a fingernail on the patio door frame, not so loudly that it would startle her, but loudly enough that I thought she would surely hear it.  She did.

She looked up, right at me, though who knows if she could see me (they are reported to have very poor eyesight).  She tilted her head a couple of times, walked forward on her route along the fence two or three feet, looked again in my direction, tilted her head some more, and then very peacefully and calmly meandered further along the fence, then under some trees, and then through a hole in the fence and into the neighbor’s yard.  She wasn’t in any hurry at all and I liked that.  I didn’t want to scare her or threaten her, just encourage her to move on to the next phase of her evening jaunt.

What a thrill that was for me, and how beautiful she was!  I’d never seen a skunk in the wild before.  There are lots of woods around where I live and I’m not surprised there would be skunks here, but they don’t much like humans and tend to keep their distance.

Of course, as soon as she was gone, I raced to the computer to see what kind of skunk she was and to learn about her.  She was a Pacific Striped Skunk.  They are found from British Columbia (Canada) to Mexico, are polygamous omnivores, and have few predators except for birds of prey.

They range in size from 4 pounds to 12 pounds.  The one that visited me seemed large.

The English word “skunk” comes from the Algonquian/Abenaki word “seganku”.

Their pelts were prized, except that hunting them in the wild usually resulted in a very stinky and unusable pelt, whether hunting them to kill them or to trap them alive in order to remove the scent glands.  The effort and cost involved usually negated any profit from selling the pelt, so they were rarely hunted.  They are still largely ignored by humans except for a relatively small population of skunks in captive breeding programs where the scent glands are removed from juveniles before the glands become active.

The sprayed oily “musk” can reach several meters away from the animal.  The odor was likened by Ernest Thompson Seton to a mixture of perfume musk, essence of garlic, burning sulfur, and sewer gas, all “magnified a thousand times”.

The earliest fossils of this variety of skunk date back about 1.8 million years.  Evidently pretty much everyone who ever lived on the face of the earth learned to leave these folks alone!

A number of websites report that the Pacific Striped Skunk is the least aggresive of any of the skunk family.  The Pacific Striped Skunk will ordinarily stomp with its front feet, hiss and spit, bare its teeth, rise up on its back legs and threaten you with the claws on its front paws, and even leave the area if it can, before it will turn and raise its hind end and spray.  Where other types of skunk will spray rather quickly if cornered, the Pacific Striped Skunk uses spraying as a last resort (“reloading” for them takes about a week, so they aren’t as apt to spray without good reason).

Over the next several weeks after her visit to my patio, I looked for this new furry neighbor many times at about the same time in the evening … the same time by the clock or when the dusky, evening light was about the same intensity.  As far as I know, she hasn’t been back my way.  I suppose it’s just as well that she does not make it a habit to wander through people’s back yards hereabouts.  But I sure did like that I got to see her that one time.