“They lived here long before we did,” said my neighbor. “Why should we think they should not live here now?”
“Because they destroy our flowers, our vegetables, our yew bushes, and some of them wreck our cars,” I responded. “They have no natural enemies and they take advantage of everything we have.”
Our subject was the deer, which have spawned by the hundreds in our neighborhood and, by common accounts, many others east of the Mississippi River. When I was a Boy Scout in my mid-south home, we never saw deer or foxes or any other wild beasts larger than rabbits and squirrels, except for a few raccoons and possums. When we moved to a Washington suburb some 40 years ago, we saw no deer or foxes. Our only battle was with squirrels that got into our bird feeders, despite our clever ways of trying to stop them.
Our Washington home was in a new subdivision built in what had been a dairy farm. The cows were gone. The oak trees in our backyard were dying because the root systems were buried in the altered slope from the house down to the creek at the edge of our lot. We sowed more grass, planted forsythias, rhododendrons, azaleas, and yew bushes. Diana loaded the flower beds at the edge of the house with tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, corn, and even pumpkins for Halloween one year. As we chopped down the oak trees, the logs were wonderful firewood. We watered, fertilized, weeded, and mowed. And there were no signs of deer in those years.
In 1976, I bought a boat, which we placed in a marina on the Chesapeake Bay. It became our weekend family camper. My attention to the yard and the shrubs faded. We still planted flowers and some tomatoes. We noticed that the birds ate the tomatoes, even when I put nets over them. And our son grew big enough to push the gas-driven lawnmower, even on the slope in the backyard.
One summer morning, Diana looked out of the kitchen window and pointed to an animal stalking a chipmunk. “It’s a fox,” she said. “You are a city girl. How would you know?” But then I caught a glimpse as the chipmunk fled. It looked like a fox to me. When we saw the fox attack, kill, and eat a rabbit, we bragged about it.
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