No; this isn't an image generated by artificial intelligence. It was, instead, the product of a short-lived suspension of common sense. Campers in the mountains west of Boulder somehow forgot they were in bear country when they left dishes of food and water out for their little canine friend, who is probably unhappy that the large ursine visitor has left nothing but empty bowls. Amazingly, the campers managed to disentangle their pooch from this predicament without incurring injury to any of the creatures present. Campers in Colorado's wildland-urban interface are advised to hang food from a tree (not close to the trunk) or to place food lockers securely in their vehicles. Convertibles with food in view or scent may be transformed quickly into true ragtops. We hosted a smaller black bear in our yard in the autumn of 2021. I wasn't quick enough with my camera (on the safe side of a big window) but our neighbor snapped the shot below when he visited her tree.
The ocean brings an amazing variety of wild creatures into sometimes incongruous proximity to stuff like suburban tract houses and artsy coffee shops. You can find all of these in Capitola, California, where I was paddling around waiting for waves one afternoon when something silvery turned over in the water about a yard away. It turned out to be a curious sea otter; we also saw sea lions riding the waves and were surprised when a fin breaking the surface proved to be the first of a pod of dolphins making spectacular leaps. This week is, by the way, Sea Otter Awareness Week...
Moose and elk frequent the higher elevations west of Boulder, and this female moose caught the attention of two cats in our friend's cabin in Alma, Colorado, the highest incorporated town in the US at just under 10,600 feet. You can see elk there as well, and deer aplenty. Despite what the locals say, though, none of these creatures seem as common as, say, sheep are in Scotland...
Sometimes, however, it seems like the deer in our back yard are as common as sheep in Scotland. We've counted as many as 7 at a time.
If you accept the idea, though, that the first in line gets the best seats (like concert-goers waiting for Taylor Swift tickets) It turns out that deer are not intruding into our territory, but that we're intruding into theirs. This is because deer lived on this continent long before any humans even thought of showing up...
White-tailed deer, the oldest species, have lived in North America for at least 4 million years, while the related elk, caribou and moose only showed up after the last ice age, maybe 15,000 years ago. Native Americans, by the way, arrived before the last ice sheets retreated, meaning that they had white-tailed deer as company, but probably no moose or elk.
The endurance and persistence of the deer is enough to bring home the transitory nature of some things, like human settlements, set against the vast time scale of life on the only planet where we know it exists. The image below, taken after the Cal-Wood Fire burned over 10,000 acres back in October 2020, connects somehow with this theme of wild survival. Domestic farm animals and inseparable friends, Ennis the donkey and Adam the horse ran for safety from a fire that burned 5,000 acres in the first 5 hours. Their owner assumed they were lost in the blaze, but their instincts, after all, turned out to be more permanent than any of the barriers built to contain them.
Photo Credits:
Top: Photographer unknown, donated by Isaac Stokes
2nd: Veronika Sprinkel
3rd: Ocean Conservancy
4th & 5th: Matt Kennan
6th & 7th: Rhonda Hunter
8th: Bob Poeschl
Bottom: Eric Garner