One recent morning, I stepped onto the path that leads from my apartment to begin my walk to the store. Ahead of me, a squirrel paused in its work; it gave me a sharp look before it whirled and leapt into a tree. A dove flared up, chittering, its white-edged tail a sail behind it. House sparrows stitched the sky in some avian pursuit and from some hidden roost in a tree, an obnoxious jay screamed. That was the nature of the fauna I encountered — discounting the cats, of course. And in Cedar Knolls, New Jersey, a deer has come out of the woods, to begin “munching the young tufts of spring.”
Actually, it was summer, and the tufts were not so young, but the deer was, as were the wild turkey chicks that scampered behind the adult as it moved deeper into the trees. And during my morning walk with my granddaughter to find birds, we scared up a fat groundhog and stood quietly to watch a fawn sit still in the bushes. She wanted to get closer, but I told Imani that the fawn’s mommy had told it to sit very still, until she came back. “The fawn didn’t even argue,” I said, hinting at the possibility of different behavior from my granddaughter.
The buildings of the apartment complex where my daughter has nestled my grandchildren seem to have been dropped flat into the middle of a forest. They are surrounded by dense trees and thick bushes, but the people in the buildings have grown accustomed to seeing a turkey walking down the middle of the sidewalk, seemingly headed toward the mailboxes to check its mail. On our morning walks, I will note for my granddaughter the call of the red-bellied woodpecker, and the pecking sound of its hammering on the trees. We try to figure out which animal clawed the hole in the ground, and where the groundhog might really live. I do not see this kind of wildlife in my neighborhood, not even the tortoise which, having appeared from nowhere that I could see, makes its laborious way from the asphalt of the parking lot to the hedges lining the sidewalk, ducking the torn lettuce thrown to it by my granddaughter.
Except: In a conversation with my front-house neighbor, he told me about a flock of geese that had taken over the front lawn last summer, and confirmed my sighting of a raccoon that seemed to live in the sewer. “Yeah; I saw it,” he told me, saying that he had been grilling and had a plate of meat and corn. “I threw the guy an ear of corn, and he picked it up, looked at it and left it in the middle of the street. I wasn’t giving him any steak,” he laughed, saying that he did not realize that the raccoon lived in the sewer. “But now, whenever my friend comes by, she looks for it.”
My Indianapolis neighborhood has some areas that are similar to the woods near my grandchildren in New Jersey, but I do not see the kind of wildlife that regularly roam their Cedar Knolls subdivision. I’ve not seen flocks of wild turkeys, the adults urging the chicks to fly from small hills; nor have I seen waddling groundhogs and toddling tortoises. Deer do not come out of the trees to greet me (nor do ponies, as in James Wright’s poem, “A Blessing.”) The fauna I see may be less “wild,” but the cats, squirrels, jays and sewer-dwelling raccoons give the streets a uniquely feral flavor, with less of the “oh, my.”