Getting to Know the Neighbors

After several uncertain Halloweens, I sat on my stoop early in the evening of October 31, passing out candy and drinking apple cider. Sorry to bring this up during asparagus season, but you’ll see why in a moment. I knew very few of my neighbors then, but I soon learned who lived in what house, who belonged to one another, and what they were dressed up as. Then, between visits from humans, another neighbor poked their head from the leaf litter. Barely visible, this creature was grey and roughly mouse-shaped, with tiny eyes and an abbreviated tail. I barely breathed while I watched it sniff around, but it retreated under the leaves when more children ran up to my front steps. Who was this creature? I later looked it up: a Northern short-tailed shrew.

Because of its tiny little eyes, I could tell that the shrew mostly navigated the world with other senses, and it does sense its prey with smell and touch. But they are surprising animals! In addition to plants, short-tailed shrews eat voles and mice, disabling the animals equal its size with a toxic bite. (Source: Mammals, Smithsonian Handbooks Series) Happy Halloween, indeed. I still think they’re cute.

Who eats the shrews? One evening around this time last year, while walking my dogs, I felt something overhead. Nothing else is so silent when it flies. I saw the owl perched on a branch, silhouetted against the bright night sky. It was quite small: an eastern screech owl. Besides shrews, screech owls eat chipmunks, bats, mice, and many species of birds. (Source: Owls: The Silent Fliers by R. D. Lawrence). This was early May, and I believe the bird that soared so silently above my head was trying to dissuade me and my dogs from approaching her nest. Her eggs might have very recently hatched.

From The House of Owls by Tony Angell, I learned that owls do not build their own nests, and instead move into cavities in trees excavated by other birds. “Without the flicker,” Angell writes, “and other medium to large woodpeckers, the boreal, northern pygmy, eastern and western screech, saw-whet, elf, whiskered, and ferruginous owls would be hard pressed to find suitable roosting and nesting cavities.” Flickers are also my neighbors. I see them most often on my balcony heading toward the suet feeder, but I have now learned that their favorite food is ants. According to David Allen Sibley in the wonderful What It’s Like To Be a Bird, many people do not realize flickers are a type of woodpecker, because they are so often seen hopping along the ground searching for ants.

Who else lives in my neighborhood? We often see a fox on our evening walks. I suspect the fox sees us more often than we see it, actually, because they are talented at hiding. Red foxes are smaller than you might imagine, weighing on average only 8-15 pounds – a bit smaller than of each of my dogs. The fox-curious should read The Hidden World of the Fox by mammal ecologist Adele Brand, which is about foxes in what we think of as their natural environment, but especially about foxes thriving in what we think of as our environment: cities and suburbs. Brand even shares a story of a fox named Romeo who climbed all the way to the 72^nd floor of the Shard, London’s tallest building, while it was under construction. (Romeo was fed scraps by construction workers, captured by a wildlife rescue group, and released.)

On summer evenings, when every lawn seems to have a solitary and very still rabbit, I think of the overlapping territorial claims of the town. The homeowner claims to own that lawn, but so does the rabbit; it is also included in a fox’s territory, and there may be others as well. As the weather warms, my apartment’s wooden balcony is the site of great aerial battles: carpenter bees. Carpenter bees are a eusocial species, meaning they live in complex groups with overlapping generations, a reproductive division of labor, and cooperative care of the brood (Source: The Bee: A Natural History by Noah Wilson-Rich). They seem so aggressive as they loudly buzz and fly at one another that I reflexively duck when they whizz over my head as I tend to my potted plants. But they do not sting! After a few weeks of intense activity, the bees settle a bit, and I can reclaim “my” balcony again.

What is it like to be a bee, a rabbit, or an owl? I highly recommend two books for those wondering about the lives of animals: Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel by Carl Safina and An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong. Both are thoughtful, and even tender, considerations of the experiences of animals, with Safina focusing on animal thought and Yong focusing on animal senses. If you’re curious about your animal and insect neighbors, the Mercer County Library System has a wealth of gossip about their lives!

- by Corina B, West Windsor Branch