The Last Word On Nothing

I received the unusual gift this season of a stuffed mountain lion. On any other day I’d politely turn it down, but it was a thing to contend with and now it is perched in the den, a Christmas gift with its clawed catcher’s mitt of a right forepaw extended for a swipe. The pose is not serene, nose curled in offense, mouth displayed half-hissing. Putting this creature, six feet long from nose to tail, in the living room didn’t seem fair to our house cat, nor to the poor puma who I’d rather not have to watch us eat and watch movies. It went instead to the den where I write.

My stepdad, an adventurous gent, had shown me this strange creature years ago in a house in the woods abandoned by a divorce and left to rot. A realtor had told him about it and he saw the taxidermy through the window. When he took me there, it was a prank. He wanted to show me a den with a mountain lion in it. Those were the words he used, not a lie, and my mind ran with a snow drift framing a nest of tree roots where I imagined its entrance and exit strewn with sticks and dabs of mud and blood.

What I took my stepdad to mean was that he’d found an active den, not with an actual puma in it, but with fresh sign, maybe a kill dragged into a shelter. When he led me down behind the abandoned house, I thought how ingenious for a mountain lion to den among construction piles and pieces of equipment covered with half-rotted tarps behind a big log cabin. Who would bother it here? Snow three-feet-deep would have been good for tracks but I saw none, thinking the cat must have been gone from here for weeks.

One of the first things I did when my family moved to our house a few years ago was buy a decent bird feeder. I filled it with seed and hung it from an eave on the porch, and less than a minute later a couple of black-capped chickadees flitted over to investigate. Before long song sparrows joined them, and then dark-eyed juncos, house finches, spotted towhees, others. From the kitchen I watched happily as a little community assembled itself.

Not everyone in the household shared my enthusiasm. We live in Seattle and like most cities Seattle has an abundance of rats. The locals soon discovered the feeder. At first they came only at night as single spies, but when time went by and nothing killed them, they grew bold. One afternoon my wife saw a nice big fat rat casually sorting through the birds’ castoffs.

“A rat!” she yelled. She hates rats.

“But just one this time!” I protested.

She gaped. “You mean you’ve seen more than one?!”

So that was a problem. She had loftier objections, too. “You’re always going on and on about wildness!” she said. “How is feeding birds at all consistent with that?” The ones flocking to the feeder, she pointed out, had been doing just fine on their own before. Wouldn’t it be better to attend to our yard in such a way so they can forage for a steady diet of insects and plant seeds, rather than plucking stale peanuts and millet out of a silo? Worse, isn’t feeding birds and reveling in their antics simply reducing them to mere entertainments? Here I was, an ecologist who studied birds, trying to entice them to me “like you’re Snow White.”

(An unauthorized continuation of “Things We Like”)

Scattered along the deep ravines and canyons where I live are trees called ghost, or sometimes grey, pines. The trees are scraggly and uncharismatic. “Scarcely in any sense a beautiful tree,” Willis Jepson, one of California’s early botanists, wrote of them in 1901, they give “no comfort of shade to the inexperienced wayfarer who, dusty and sun-bitten, seeks its protection.”

But I love ghost pines, which thrive in the poor, rocky soils of California’s foothills. I especially love their enormous cones, which grow as big as pineapples. I’ve been admiring this one on my desk, searching for any pine nuts the squirrels might have left behind, and watching insects circumnavigate its girth. I like its heft and overlapping, talon-sharp scales, which make it look like a medieval instrument of torture. You won’t find this pine cone in a bag of cinnamon-scented holiday potpourri, or glue-gunned to a wreath.