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By now, I imagine that many of you have seen baby birds trying out their wings and exploring the world with their parents. A baby mourning dove and a baby robin have both fluttered awkwardly around in my small back yard. A mourning dove parent sat calmly nearby and watched as I photographed the young one, but the robin parents put up a huge fuss as I merely walked toward my car.
As always, the best advice when you find any baby critter is to leave it alone. Only if you know for a fact that a mother has been killed should you intervene, and then only to make sure that the baby gets to a qualified wildlife rehabilitator. In most cases, it is against the law to care for them yourself, and without training and lots of time, it is often unsuccessful anyway.
There was no doubt that a pair of redwing blackbird parents was very much alive when I pulled onto a side road in Vernon County’s Kickapoo Valley Reserve last week. They immediately warned me to keep away, so I stayed in my car and never saw the nest.
As the male kept scolding, the female got down to the business of gathering food for her brood and eventually landed in a shrub very close to me with four squirming caterpillars packed in her beak. It was a comical sight, and I wondered how she was able to open her mouth to grab each new bug without losing the others.
Life and deathAfter I had shared the joy of new life with the noisy redwing family, I was quickly reminded of the other side of the coin. I was heading for an area of wetlands in another part of the reserve when I saw a raccoon along the road. As I drove nearer, it became obvious that the animal was very sick. It was thin, had an arched back and seemed disoriented.
The sickly creature walked slowly back and forth as I took pictures to show the staff at the Kickapoo Valley Reserve office. As I continued to the wetlands I suspected that by the time I returned and went to the office the coon might have wandered off or have been run over. In fact, I wondered if it might actually be better off if it was quickly relieved of its suffering in that way.
However, that didn’t ease my sense of shock on the way back when I rounded a curve and saw the same coon lying dead in the road. My sense of relief was overpowered by my disgust that someone had hit the creature in broad daylight while it stood in the road.
When I showed the pictures to Jason Leis, property manager at the reserve, he recognized it immediately. A concerned visitor had already alerted him so he had called the local DNR warden to find out what to do. He was advised to shoot the animal in case it was diseased.
Leis was relieved to hear that it was already dead; no one likes to have to do that sort of thing. But as we discussed the incident, we both agreed that it was just an inevitable part of nature. All animals live for a while and eventually they die. Some eat plants, others eat other animals and many are eaten by other animals or even by people. That has been the way of life on earth for hundreds of millions of years.
As far as we know, though it is highly debatable, only humans feel emotions about this process. I was indeed sad about the raccoon — after all, I had seen it alive only moments before. I also felt relief that it had died quickly, and that Jason didn’t have to shoot it.
But in the larger scheme of things this was simply the death of one raccoon out of many millions of raccoons that have died since raccoons first walked on the planet.
Though we will all probably continue to be sad when animals like that raccoon die, we can realize that it is an absolutely crucial part of life on earth. While individuals die, life in all its glory goes on. As lovers of the outdoors, we need to accept this reality and not let it mar our appreciation for the wonders of the natural world around us.
Pink Lady’s SlipperSpeaking of the wonders of nature, I recently found a truly beautiful wild flower I had never seen before. I was lying on a mat of squishy sphagnum moss taking a picture of some fuzzy fiddleheads unfurling on one of the last days of May in the Black River State Forest in Jackson County.
I had taken several pictures when I suddenly realized that an even more interesting plant was growing just inches behind the ferns. It had been hiding behind a small tree, and it took me a few minutes to realize that I was looking at a pink lady’s slipper, one of the more fascinating wild orchids that grow in the region.
I had seen the more common yellow lady’s slipper a couple times before, but this was new to me. Pink lady’s slippers grow in boggy places, like this one, and in dry acid soil, such as that around and under pine trees.
A couple days later, while looking for yellow lady’s slippers a few miles away along the shore of Potter’s Flowage, I found another pink lady’s slipper under some pines but no yellow ones. Happily, I later found three yellow beauties growing in Vernon County near Norskedalen after being given a tip by wildflower expert John Zoerb of La Crosse.
Jim Solberg can be reached at nitefrogger@charter.net or (608) 782-2560.
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