Why we have a fence around the garden

Every so often I hear guys whining about how lousy the hunting's become, there are no whitetail deer left in Baraga County, if there were no wolves the deer would be back in record numbers, and so on ad nauseum. We have a neighbor, for example, who claims to never see any deer anywhere anymore.

Fawn tracks in the driveway. I was wishing I had a dime to set next to them for scale. The tracks are tiny.

The guys doing the whining are either the most incompetent hunters on the planet or they're blind. I practically tripped over a doe yesterday while hanging out the laundry. Then when I was on my way to check on how my freshly planted raspberry canes are doing in the garden, I noticed evidence of recent browsing nearby.

Maybe we should connect the fence charger. If the deer are browsing within spitting distance of the Woman Cave, sooner or later they might decide the broccoli growing a few feet away looks good.We haven't bothered connecting a battery to the charger for a couple summers, but sooner or later there's going to be a new generation of Odocoileus virginianus that's going to question why they always detour around the fencing instead of trying to go through it.

The deer barrier, which is about five feet away from this patch of browsed on vegetation, consists of a 4-foot wide strip of poultry fencing topped with 3 strands of electric fence. Years ago we started off with just tall livestock fencing, which the deer skipped merrily over. That's when we started adding electric fencing. When it got up to three strands, they quit trying.

I can never remember the name of the stuff the deer have browsed on, but it's kind of a nifty plant for providing fill at the back of a flower garden. I'm contemplating digging some up to fill in empty spaces in the native plants garden at the museum. Maybe. My gathering focus at the moment is more on trilliums and virgin's bower than it is on plants that are so mundane I can't remember what they're called.

Killer wildlife in our back yard

If you look close, you might spot one of the regulars in our yard, a varying hare (aka snowshoe rabbit, or Lepus americanus). The no-longer-wee beastie has been hanging around since early summer. It did a fair amount of lounging in the flower bed near the front door, and it would also loiter near the path leading from the back door to the driveway. It showed so little fear of us when it was a little tiny ball of fluff that I was sure it was going to be lunch for an actual predator any time. But, nope, it survived. And it's still around. As is typical of adults of many species, it's a lot more skittish now than it was when it was younger.

I always kind of wonder about the local wild rabbits, both the varying hares and the cottontails, because I see rabbits and hare tracks around fairly often, but almost never see very many of either tracks or animals. Like with this particular varying hare: it showed up when it was at basically the toddler stage. I know enough about hares and rabbits to be aware that there are usually at least 4 young in a litter. I also know that even though hares are born fully furred with their eyes open and able to be up and running almost immediately, they do keep returning to the mother for several weeks to nurse in the evening. So where was the mom? Never saw her. Also never saw any litter mates, just the one hare. But there can't be just one hare: it took at least two to produce the one we see all the time, and odds are that it wasn't an only child. Where did the rest of them go?

I see wildlife

Behold Chelydra serpentina, the common snapping turtle. Every year about this time I'll spot at least one female snapper trucking on down the road looking for a nesting site. I have a hunch this one was heading for the CN tracks because there's a fair amount of exposed stamp sand as part of the roadbed there. Maybe I'm giving the turtle more credit than she deserves, but I assume she had a goal in mind -- she was walking along the road and not just crossing it.

I always wonder how turtles manage to survive -- they pick some of the riskiest sites I can imagine for laying their eggs. A few years ago a painted turtle (Chrysemys picta) decided the turn-around for our driveway would make a good nesting site. Granted, the spot she picked was sand so I guess it's kind of beach-like, but it was also right in the middle of where we turn the vehicles around. After she left, we marked the spot so we'd know to avoid it, but that didn't really help. The S.O.'s elderly cousin who has some vision problems (we joke about his "seeing eye 4-wheeler" because he's driving the local roads primarily by memory) couldn't see the marker and drove right over it. That suggests that particular turtle's reproductive success for that year was Zero. Still, some turtles must be nesting successfully. If they weren't, we wouldn't keep seeing other turtles picking high risk locales.