Drupelets

Last week, the skunks came out of the woodwork and onto the streets. Taking Bug and Button to school (a matter of about 6 miles) I passed two freshly-killed skunks, one a few blocks from our house and another a mile or so from the school. Half a mile past the school, on the way to work, I passed a third fresh corpse.

The next day I passed two more, and they've been everywhere since. One of the skunks was on the main drag, half a mile from the mall in the most dense commercial zone in town. It's like the streets have been carpeted in sable and argent.

We don't live out in the country—we live in the heart of the largest city for eighty miles in any direction. Although over the years I've seen a considerable variety of wildlife up to one roaming coyote, it's not unusual for me to go several months without seeing a freshly-killed skunk.

Morgan reminds me that a few years ago there was a similar outbreak of sail-squirrels (the ones you can peel up and sail like frisbees). We had noticed an unusual number of squirrels in our yard—in fact, we'd been live-trapping them and taking them to a park; you haven't been cussed out until you've been cussed by a pissed-off squirrel—then suddenly they all ran out into the streets at once.

It's as if there's some particular population density at which the pheromone levels or competition for food or something suddenly causes an 80% drop in survival instincts, and an entire species suddenly turns into Walt Disney lemmings. Only the fastest and smartest survive—the species as a whole is improved.

While lemming stampedes are a myth (Wikipedia.org), I've read that locusts actually undergo a physical change when their population density reaches the swarming level: after a locust's hind legs have been bumped into enough times, it changes color and gets larger and begins eating everything green in sight.

Heaven help us if this should happen to anything larger than skunks and possums. If deer and bears suddenly started running out in front of cars here in town, we'd have chaos.

I don't hunt, myself, but I grew up around hunters and fishermen and I understand the serious hunting community (as opposed to the beer-swilling-morons-with-shotguns community). Most of the serious hunters I know are also conservationists, and prefer a balanced wildlife system. But the large predators have been mostly cleared out of the Ozarks. Cougars, wolves, and even coyotes are scarce or altogether absent.

So for deer and other large herbivores that leaves a choice between hunting and overpopulation. Several years back, in response to calls for reducing or outlawing deer hunting, the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission published their predictions of what would result. They estimated that, without human predation, deer would be overrunning farms within five years, and that within ten years there would be over 50,000 collisions per year between deer and cars.

A woman I used to work for did hit a doe here in town, right on the interstate. A small doe, but the front of her car was folded up like an old coke can; she was lucky the deer didn't come through the windshield into her lap.

So I can handle the little animals, the skunks and rabbits and possums and squirrels and maybe the occasional raccoon, but let's hope that nothing averaging bigger than fifteen pounds or so decides to suddenly thin out its population here in town. I just couldn't stand the excitement.

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