Wild Animals Everywhere

Lambs lying down with lions

Recently I read the Medium article, What If the Coronavirus Helped Us?, by Kristin Wilson . It is by far the best Coronavirus article I have read to date, bar none. It is very positive and uplifting and offers great mind food. I wholeheartedly suggest everyone read it.

The article got me to thinking about other positive things that could be added to Kristin’s list and I may get to that in a future post. But there is one positive aspect of the current panic that I feel like talking about right now. And that is about how wild animals are suddenly walking into our communities due to the lack of traffic and all humans being indoors.

I recently watched some video about this. I saw footage of dolphins swimming in the canals of Venice for the first time in many years. I saw footage of deer wandering through cities and of a coyote walking down a deserted avenue in downtown Chicago. And then I saw footage of a wild puma casually sauntering down an empty street in downtown Santiago, Chile.

This really, really, really turned me on!

I have been profoundly obsessed with mountain lions (pumas) since I was about six years old. As a kid I read everything I could get my little hands on about them (both fiction and non-fiction). When my family would go up into the mountains for a picnic I would be constantly looking all around me hoping to spot a mountain lion. And I’ve been looking ever since.

Of the top five items on my official bucket list, two of them involve wild animals. One is to see a whooping crane in the wild and the other is to see a mountain lion in the wild.

I have spent a great deal of my life in the American West and have gone up into the mountains of nine different states — always hoping to encounter a mountain lion in the wild. But I never have.

When I lived in Washington State I visited the Northwest Trek Wildlife Preserve and spent an inordinate amount of time staring through the fencing into the mountain lion habitat. I so longed to be on the other side of the fencing with those lions. Although the habitat was designed to be as natural as possible it was surrounded by very tall fencing. (Mountain lions can jump higher than any of the big cats.) Technically, the cats were not wild. Although I was at one point no more than 30 feet away from one of the lions it simply did not count as wild so I was not able to check off that bucket list item.

I once lived in a little town way, way, way up in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado (where mountain lions are still somewhat plentiful). That town was constantly overrun by wildlife long, long before the Coronavirus panic. According to local officials there were over one hundred deer living inside the city limits of that town. The number one cause of traffic accidents was deer crossing the street without first looking both ways.

Once I was taking a walk downtown and I turned around the corner of a building and almost walked directly into a deer. The doe and I both immediately stopped. We were no more than two feet away from each other. Without moving an inch we stared into each other’s eyes for a very long minute. Finally, I stepped to the side to allow the deer to continue walking down the sidewalk.

We also had a big problem with bears. Hardly a month would pass by without some bear coming into town and knocking down every trash can it could find. We also had plenty of racoons, rattlesnakes, rabbits, porcupines, and skunks. (I’ll have to tell my skunk story some day.)

Then there was that day a moose came wandering into town. The county that town was located in happened to be the southernmost habitat for moose in the Northern Hemisphere. But they were rare. It just wandered through town like it was sightseeing or something. The next day the front page of the local newspaper was covered with text and photos of the moose that went for a walk through downtown. (It was like stepping into a scene from Northern Exposure.)

But in all of those eighteen years I never saw a mountain lion in the wild (or wandering through town).

Then, a year or so after leaving the glorious mountains to move down to the flatlands of the Great Plains of Turtle Island there was a forest fire just outside of that town where I used to live. When there is a forest fire animals skedaddle. They don’t stick around to roast marshmallows.

I heard from friends still living in that town that in the two weeks during the fire that the town was overrun with wildlife fleeing the fire and that there were over two dozen mountain lion sightings inside that town.

I was heartbroken. If only I had stayed in that town for a couple more years I might have had an encounter with a wild mountain lion. But then again, I would have been heartbroken watching the smoke pour into the sky from that mountain where the fire was. I’ve been close to forest fires before and there is nothing more gut wrenching. It’s far worse than a pandemic panic.

Anyway, my bucket list still has many boxes that have not been checked off. Seeing a whooping crane in the wild is actually far less likely than seeing a puma in the wild. This, of course, means that I will be living many more years before I can finish that bucket list. That’s good to know because I’m not even close to being ready to kick the bucket.

Some readers will no doubt want to point out that if I did indeed have an encounter with a mountain lion in the wild I could very well kick the proverbial bucket right then and there. But I know in the core of my heart that if and when I do have that encounter there will be no fear whatsoever in my heart. Just like I have no fear whatsoever in my heart of some tiny invisible virus. When we hold on to fear we succumb. When we bravely walk through fear we tend to come upon something wonderful on the other side.

We are already getting glimpses of what is on the other side of the fear. And I am starting to get really excited about it.

Copyright by White Feather. All Rights Reserved.

Speaking of whooping cranes…