The ad manager of The West Marin Citizen, Linda Petersen, a week ago asked Lynn and me to take care of her Havanese dog Eli for three days while she was away. Lynn and I had done so before, and since Eli is a fun dog, we readily agreed to take him again.

Eli is always happy to see me and often hops into my lap when I sit down, perhaps because I give him an excessive amount of petting and scratching. Eli reciprocates by frequently cleaning my beard. (Photo by Lynn Axelrod)

Although he’s almost always inside the house when foxes arrive on the deck each evening, for three days Eli managed to drive them off with his barking. The raccoons, however, were more nonchalant and stood outside the kitchen’s glass door looking him in the face.

Eli’s big adventure of the weekend occurred after I had let go of his leash and he discovered a flock of wild turkeys in my pasture. Barking as he ran, Eli scattered the flock. Most of the turkeys flew across a small canyon while several others flew to the top of a fairly tall pine tree. I had never before seen a turkey on the wing make such a steep climb.

Once Eli was gone, the foxes felt safe in returning. Ironically, eating nose to nose on my deck with one or more raccoons bothered them less than being on the deck when Eli was inside this glass door.

Most wild animals on this hill act as if my cabin were my cage. The moment I get out of it, they get skittish, the foxes more than the deer, as can be seen.

When I’m inside, however, foxes feel comfortable coming up to the door even when it’s open.

A fox sits on a woodbox outside my dining-room window and surveys the dinner table.

The raccoons around my cabin often do the same thing. (Photo by Linda Petersen)

Is a fox shy or fierce?

It’s ironic that we tend to think of foxes as shy. Their reputation was much fiercer in the past. There is a legend about a hungry boy in ancient Sparta who stole a fox he intended to eat.

When the boy encountered some soldiers, he hid the stolen fox under his tunic and answered their questions. Although the fox was chewing into his stomach, the boy endured the pain without flinching to avoid being exposed as a thief.

Sparta, of course, had its own code of conduct. In Greek legend, the boy was not dishonorable for stealing the fox but admirable for his stoicism.

Unlike Eli, I’m on generally good terms with the foxes. I can hand feed them slices of bread, but I’m not about to scratch their bellies or let them clean my beard.

The Age of Revolution once referred to the years from 1775 to 1848 when absolutist monarchies were forcibly replaced by republics or constitutionalist states. These upheavals included the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, and revolutions throughout Latin America.

After World War II, a second Age of Revolution occurred in Africa as colonies freed themselves from their European masters. Most of these revolts were in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.

Twenty-six wild turkeys two weeks ago marched for food in Point Reyes Station.

Now a third Age of Revolution is sweeping the world. It all began last month when street protesters in Tunisia toppled the 23-year regime of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. That, of course, helped inspire street protests which earlier this month led to the resignation of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak after a 29-year rule. An estimated 365 protesters had been killed by the time he left office.

Immediately protesters in Yemen demanded that President Ali Abdullah Saleh resign after 32 years in office. Saleh has said he won’t seek reelection in 2013, but protesters want him out now. Nine protesters have been killed so far.

Street protests also spread to Bahrain where seven people have been killed in demonstrations against the prime minister, Sheikh Khalifa bin Salman al Khalifa, over economic problems in the island kingdom.

Other street protests in the region are occurring in Libya (1,000 or more protesters killed), Morocco (five killed), Algeria (two killed), Kuwait (some reportedly tortured), and Jordan (eight injured).

Elsewhere street protests have been cropping up against authoritarian regimes in China, Russia, and…. Wisconsin?

A fox on my deck last week looking for bread.

The street protesters in Wisconsin, who are upset with their anti-union governor, Republican Scott Walker, are reminiscent of women strikers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, a century ago. Their demands back then? “We want bread and roses too.”

Nor is the fox alone in its desire for more bread, along with roses. Three raccoons showed up tonight to join in the demonstration.

Even a possum waddled onto my deck to take part.

The fox, the raccoons, and the possum all want bread but prefer peanuts. By offering them a few goobers, I was able to convince them to pose with a rose for these portraits.

No doubt authoritarian potentates from Vladimir Putin to Moammar Khadafy to Gov. Walker wish their problems could be solved for peanuts. But they can’t, which is why they find common people around the globe to be revolting.

Valentine’s Day will be Monday, and here are some thoughts for the occasion. The first is from Kaiser Permanente, which sent out a mass mailing this week noting that dark chocolate is good for your heart and that “some say it even mimics the feeling of being in love.”

While on the topic of hearts, here is my annual Valentine’s Day greeting from a flock of Canada geese flying over Inverness Ridge, as seen from my deck.

Romantically inclined gentlemen have traditionally given their ladies flowers for Valentine’s Day. Here Mrs. Raccoon, who works part time at Flower Power in Point Reyes Station, shows off a particularly nice bouquet.

How men respond to feminine beauty is to some degree, of course, a matter of culture, as we could see when an attractive young woman dropped what she was carrying during the G8 countries’ summit in Canada last June.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper was too preoccupied with his own appearance to notice, and President Barack Obama remained all business while French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi admired her comely derriére.

By now Valentine’s Day is often associated with greeting cards called Valentines, which are typically printed with saccharin
messages or a bit of doggerel: “The rose is red./ The violet’s blue./ The honey’s sweet,/ and so are you.”

The origin of that line, by the way, can be found 420 years ago in Edmund Spenser’s poem The Faerie Queen: “She bath’d with roses red, and violets blew,/ And all the sweetest flowres, that in the forrest grew.”

By the early 1800s, Valentine’s cards were being assembled in factories, and with the development of modern printing in the years that followed, printed messages replaced handwritten notes. The woman holding this large, pink Valentine was photographed about 1910.

There must be something trippy about this time of year. If you’ve never experienced an acid trip, the following kenesthetic hallucination will give you an idea of what it’s like.

Here’s what to do: click on the link at the end of this posting, then “click me to get trippy,” then stare at the center of the screen for a full 30 seconds, then look at your hand holding the mouse without moving it away from the mouse. You’ll be amazed at the result: Happy Valentine’s Day!

Great blue herons are the most widespread variety of heron in North America, and one of them has taken to frequenting the field around Mitchell cabin.

Great blue herons typically weigh 4.5 to 8 pounds and measure 36 to 55 inches from their heads to their tails. Their wing spans are huge, 5.5 to 6.5 feet. As birds go, their stride is also impressive, usually around nine inches in a straight line.

A Great blue heron and a Blacktail doe take a late-afternoon stroll together in my pasture.

Although herons do much of their hunting in shallow water, where they prey on small fish, crabs, shrimp, and insects, they also hunt in fields such as mine, where they dine on rodents, frogs, snakes, and even small birds. Great blues swallow their prey whole and have been known to choke on oversized morsels.

In other matters, if you have not yet seen the YouTube video of a “flash mob” in the Antwerp, Belgium, train station, you really ought to.

As people walk through the bustling station, a recording of Julie Andrews singing Do Re Me from The Sound of Music starts playing. Dancers young and old gradually emerge from the crowd until roughly 200 of them are prancing in the center of the lobby, much to the delight of onlookers.

Most of us know the song: “Do, a deer, a female deer; re, a drop of golden sun; mi, a name I call myself; fa, a long, long way to run…” The tune was running through my head yesterday, so I began singing it for my friend Lynn Axelrod.

When I came to “ti, a drink with jam and bread,” however, she was surprised. “I always thought it was ‘a drink with German bread,’ Lynn laughed. “Julie Andrews’ enunciation must not have been very good.”

I’d add that it’s just as easy to spot something else that probably contributed to Lynn’s misunderstanding. In the musical, Julie Andrews as a governess teaches the song to the von Trapp family children to mitigate the Austrian-military-style parenting of Capt. von Trapp.

As it happens, there is a word for mishearing a lyric the way Lynn did: mondegreen. It comes from people misunderstanding a line in an old Scottish ballad, “Thou hae slay the Earl of Murray and laid him on the green,” as “Thou hae slay the Earl of Murray and Lady Mondegreen.”

Other notable mondegreens include a line from a hymn, “the cross I’d bear” being heard as “the cross-eyed” bear.” Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “There’s a bad moon on the right” has likewise been misheard as, “There’s a bathroom on the right.” (Please see the 1st and 3rd comments regarding this one.)

But my favorite mondegreen is confusion over a lyric from the Beatles’ song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. On occasion, “the girl with kaleidoscope eyes” has been been misheard as “the girl with colitis goes by.”

Western Africa. Ghana is in the center at the bottom of the map.

I used to wonder who the viewers are of all the beauty and wisdom this blog imparts each week, so I checked. Although numbers vary from day to day, the largest group of readers consistently comes from the United States, particularly California.

They’re followed (at the moment, which is fairly typical) by: Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, India, Australia, and Mexico. Somewhat to my surprise, however, were the many regular visits this blog has been receiving from the geographically small country of Ghana on the west coast of Africa.

Of the roughly 200 countries on earth, Ghana was recently 9th in visits, is currently 15th, and has consistently been in the top 25.

These are not the robotic visits of computers making contacts with this blog for only an instant. Typical visits last from 45 seconds to nine minutes, and often they come from people who have never visited this site before.

By African standards, Ghana with a population of 18 million is not unusually impoverished thanks to gold, oil, diamond, bauxite, and agricultural exports. Its literacy rate has been steadily improving, and if its residents keep getting information from this blog, it could become among the most-sophisticated countries in sub-Sahara Africa.

Before long, no Ghanaian will mishear the Beatles’s She’s Got a Ticket to Ride as “She’s got a chicken to ride.” (I suspect this mondegreen originated in the United States where some people have trouble understanding English accents.)

Planned Feralhood, which uses humane methods to keep the local feral cat population under control, needs financial help for the coming year. The organization’s Trap/Neuter/Return program has become a model for other communities, and it’s worthy of our support.

Planned Feralhood, which is headed by Kathy Runnion of Inverness Park, has been taking care of West Marin’s feral cats for eight years, and for the past four years, Kathy told me last year, no kittens have been born in the targeted areas. Colonies of feral cats that were exploding in size eight years ago are now stable and healthy, the cats living out their lives without reproducing, she said.

Kathy Runnion of Planned Feralhood feeds cats at their new shelter in a barn near Nicasio Reservoir.

Volunteer feeders help keep the colonies localized. Between these colonies and the cats in its shelter, Planned Feralhood has been taking care of an average of 75 cats a day, Kathy added.

When Planned Feralhood was faced with finding new quarters last year, donations made it possible. There are now two shelters for the cats: one at Kathy’s home and one in a well-maintained barn near Nicasio Reservoir. I urge readers to support them.

Checks should be made payable to ASCS. The Animal Sanctuary and Care Society is Planned Feralhood’s IRS 501C (3) fiscal sponsor. Please mail your tax-deductible contributions to Planned Feralhood, PO Box 502, Point Reyes Station, CA 94956.

West Marin’s Gray fox population is steadily growing. Nowadays they can be seen in places as public as downtown Point Reyes Station. A year ago, Kathy, who is also a postal clerk, spotted this pair out the back window of the post office and called me, so I hurried downtown and photographed them. The foxes were sunning themselves on the roof of a Toby’s Feed Barn lean-to that adjoins the Building Supply Center lumber yard.

At Mitchell cabin, as has been noted, two or three foxes show up most evenings. In years past, I’ve seen the number of foxes and raccoons in West Marin occasionally soar only to have epidemics of distemper or some other disease cause their populations to crash.

A curious family of raccoons steps inside to inspect my kitchen.

Obviously the more raccoons and foxes there are in a region, the easier it is for disease to spread from one to another. I just hope nothing like that happens anytime soon.

Eight deer and a cat in the field below Mitchell cabin.

Unlike foxes and raccoons, West Marin’s blacktail deer are able to live in large groups without spreading diseases among themselves. The only significant exception has been infrequent outbreaks of bluetongue, a viral disease spread by a small, biting insect called a midge.

Bluetongue gets its name from the fact that the lips and tongues of animals with the disease swell, giving a blue appearance to the mouths of some of them.

Western gray squirrels are also vulnerable to insect bites. In other parts of the West, epidemics of mange, which is spread by mites, is a major cause of death among gray squirrels. This squirrel at Mitchell cabin, however, is starting the new year looking healthy.

And may you too have a healthy, happy new year notwithstanding the squirrely folks you may run into.

When Sarah Palin said in a Nov. 24 radio interview, “Obviously, we gotta stand by our North Korean allies,” it was impossible to say who was more surprised: the US government, Korean War vets, South Korea, or…. North Korea?”

If General MacArthur were still alive, he’d be rolling over in his grave, so to speak.

This week, however, another politician surprised the world even more. At a fundraiser in St. Petersburg for children with eye diseases and cancer, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin sang in English Fats Domino’s signature ditty Blueberry Hill.

If you haven’t watched Putin’s performance, I urge you to do so. It’s pure opera buffa. Although he pronounced it “Blueberry Heeel,” Putin managed to stay on key and delighted his audience, which included a host of Hollywood celebrities.

Meanwhile, my efforts to negotiate peace among this hill’s foxes and raccoons have run into a bit of a snag. Although there have been no outbreaks of hostility, each has taken to stealing the other’s food.

This initially caused me to leave bread for the foxes just inside my kitchen door, where the raccoons couldn’t see it, but the stratagem worked only briefly.

It didn’t take the raccoons long to figure out what was going on, and they began grabbing the bread before the foxes could get to it.

This left the foxes sadly contemplating the disappearance of their dinner.

Then I remembered what the late Jerry Friedman once demonstrated. Friedman, a Marin County planning commissioner, was also co-founder of the Environmental Action Committee of West Marin.

Back when I edited The Point Reyes Light, Friedman showed up one day with a photo, which we published, of his hand-feeding a fox that lived near him. If the EAC co-founder could hand food to a fox, I figured, I could too, thereby making sure the food was distributed evenly.

So far, Friedman’s system is working, and I’m feeding three foxes a night, along with three or four raccoons. The foxes and raccoons remain a bit wary of each other, and they all consider me as much a danger as a benefactor.

As for Putin, the US remains wary of him, but whether he constitutes a danger to this country is unclear. Also unclear is whether Palin is dumb like a fox or just plain dumb.

Point Reyes Station’s annual Path of Lights, which includes sidewalks decorated with luminaria and the lighting of the town Christmas tree (between Wells Fargo Bank and the Palace Market) will be held this Friday evening, Dec. 3.

The festivities will include contributors to the new issue of The West Marin Review (Volume 3) signing copies at Point Reyes Books from 5 to 7:30 p.m. More about that in a moment, but first a word from our sponsors.

A raccoon friend of mine for the past several seasons picks a slice of bread off my kitchen floor Monday.

Also on Monday, a blacktailed buck grazes just below my deck as a doe and a couple of fawns graze nearby.

Four roof rats show up on my deck Sunday to share in the birdseed I put out for my feathered friends.

One of the Point Reyes Arabians looks over my fence from beneath a persimmon tree Monday. In the upper left is a stockpond belonging to the Giacomini family.

Grey fox on my deck last week shows no reaction when I use a flash to photograph him through an open door.

Wild turkeys eating with a blacktail fawn. Perhaps “birds of a feather flock together,” but they also flock with other creatures, as seen Sunday out my kitchen window.

And now back to the news. As the West Marin Review website notes, “In [the new] volume are Jonathan Rowe’s provocative, urgent essay about the future of irreplaceable places and Elia Haworth’s sweeping history of the farmers who settled in the area.

“The beauty of West Marin is evoked in vivid, colored woodblock prints by Tom Killion, in line drawings, watercolor, and photographs, in precise rendition and in abstract design.

“Some of the poetry is site specific,” but The Review is not exclusive to West Marin. It seems that ‘place’, wherever it is, is always a source of creative inspiration. Many of the essays and poems refer back to earlier homes, earlier times and lives.

“Fiction pieces include The Miles Pilot by Cynthia Cady, funny and painful and wrenching at the same time, and The Cat Lover by Jody Farrell, where reality and fantasticality link arms.”

The list of contributors to The West Marin Review is generally impressive, and many of them will be on hand to sign copies at Point Reyes Books. Although not particularly impressive myself, I’ll be among those with pen in hand should anyone want my autograph.

This fall four foxes began showing up on my deck just after dark each evening, as has been previously reported. Although skittish, they take turns grabbing slices of bread from my hand. They eat peanuts off the deck even when the door is open and we are only three or four feet apart.

However, this is also what the local raccoons do, which has led to several encounters. On more than one occasion, a raccoon has given a fox the evil eye, causing the reynard to scamper off.

A year ago, I dealt with the same problem; only that time the adversaries were a possum and raccoon. It took a bit of planning, but their historic suspicions notwithstanding, I was able to work out a ceasefire.

To bring both sides to the negotiating table, I placed a couple of piles of peanuts on it. Over several nights, I brought the peanuts closer and closer together until possum and raccoon were finally eating nose to nose in peace.

A week ago I began trying the same strategy in fox-raccoon negotiations, starting with peanuts spread fairly far apart.

As the peanuts moved closer together over several nights, so did both animals. Mutual enmity may seem like part of their God-given nature, but as Bertolt Brecht so aptly observed, “Grub first, then ethics.”

Halloween, which will be celebrated Sunday, has its origins in the Celtic festival of Samhain. The name comes from an Old Irish word meaning summer’s end.

The ancient Celts of the Iron Age and Roman era believed the border between this world and the Otherworld was thin on Samhain, allowing both good and evil spirits to pass through. This, in turn, inspired the Celts to disguise themselves with masks and costumes to avoid the evil spirits.

With the Catholic celebration of All Hallows Even, the night before All Hallows (Saints) Day, falling at the same time of year, the two events came to be blended into Halloween. Trick-or-treating originated in the Middle Ages as a practice of poor people going door to door and receiving food in exchange for praying for the dead.

A great horned owl I photographed from my deck at twilight last week.

The symbols of Halloween eventually came to include, along with costumes and masks, jack-o-lanterns (which in the British Isles were originally carved from large turnips), black cats, bats, and owls.

Nor are owls, bats, and black cats the only spooky apparitions around my cabin this Halloween. A deck wraps around two sides of the cabin with steps leading down to the ground at both ends, and at 6:20 a.m. today I was awakened by the sound of footsteps scurrying past my bedroom window.

When I looked outside, I was amazed to see three foxes holding footraces back and forth around my home. Two of them were neck and neck with the other in a distant third place.

A winsome fox steps inside my kitchen.

As previously noted, three gray foxes have taken to dropping by each evening, hoping I will put out bread or peanuts for them.

For three or four years, I have periodically put out the same snacks for my raccoon neighbors, but now the raccoons must compete with the foxes.

They get along with each other fairly well, and I have seen a fox and raccoons eating peanuts nose to nose without conflict. Last night, however, my friend Lynn Axelrod saw one sly fox snatch a slice of bread from between the paws of a raccoon that was about to partake of it.

When the fox tried to do it a second time, however, Lynn cut loose with a Halloween-style “Boo!” and the fox ran off. From the raccoon’s perspective, Lynn had probably just fended off an evil reynard from the Otherworld.

The most recent wildlife adventures around my cabin began three weeks ago when I started down my driveway to pick up the morning Chronicle. There in the dirt at the edge of my parking area were several large paw prints, too large for the critters I usually see around here. Roughly 25 feet away, other tracks showed where a deer had kicked up dirt as it ran off.

A check of my tracking guide confirmed a mountain lion had probably been on my property the night before. That was an exciting but not altogether surprising discovery, for I’ve heard reports of mountain lion sightings along Tomasini Canyon Road, the next road to the north.

A gray fox eating bread on my deck.

With so much wildlife on this hill, my cabin has become a sort of blind for observing it.

In the past week, up to three foxes at a time have shown up on my deck. I sometimes feed them a few pieces of bread or a few peanuts, but judging from their scat, with which they mark my property (including the roof of my car), their main diet these days is blackberries.

On several occasions, I’ve watched encounters on my deck between raccoons and a fox. Neither seemed overly alarmed by the other, and at times the fox approached a raccoon within a few feet.

This is not to say that no other wildlife alarms raccoons. One kit sprang onto a post of the deck railing tonight and was about to climb to the top when suddenly it froze and flattened itself against the lattice.

For half a minute it hung there with only its head peeking over the top. Eventually the kit climbed on top of the railing, paced back and forth, but went nowhere. About this time, a couple of deer walked by just beyond the railing. Only when they were gone did the kit feel free to resume its meandering.

The foxes, however, seem not to be alarmed by any creature around my cabin. Sunday night when I scattered some tortilla chips on the deck and left the door open, this fox was curious enough about my kitchen to look inside before chowing down on the chips.

The foxes are usually skittish enough to run off a few feet when I open the kitchen door, but they quickly return.

And twice when my friend Lynn Axelrod stuck a piece of bread out the door, a fox took it from her hand.

Three, four, and even five raccoons have shown up simultaneously on my deck in the last week. They too enjoy snacking on bread, but except for one older male, they enjoy peanuts even more.

I occasionally put out a few handfuls of honey-roasted peanuts for their dessert, and I’ve had raccoon kits so enthusiastic that on occasion they grabbed my hand with their paws before I was done. Very odd to shake hands with a raccoon. Thank God they grabbed with their paws and not their teeth.

Because raccoons use their paws in eating, they wash them in my birdbath afterward, as well as take long drinks, no doubt thirsty from the salty peanuts.

Also taking advantage of my birdbath is this pine siskin.

A pine siskin swoops down to join five other siskins eating birdseed on the railing of my deck.

Pine siskins are an irruptive species, meaning that their populations can increase rapidly and irregularly. A type of finch, they are particularly plentiful this year because their main source of food, seeds, is also plentiful.

Also enjoying birdseed on my deck are roof rats, which on some evenings show up even before the birds leave.

There are noticeable variations in coloring among roof rats, with the one on the right demonstrating why they’re sometimes called black rats. I’ve written quite a bit about roof rats previously, and I won’t repeat it all here.

Canada geese fly over my cabin almost every evening. I always know by their honking when they’re coming. Some evenings several flocks in a row will head west overhead. Naturally a migratory bird, the geese used to only winter here, but in recent years West Marin has developed a large year-round population.

Also announcing themselves around my cabin these nights (in fact, I hear their yips and howls right now) are a number of coyotes. Like the gray foxes, coyotes are members of the dog family, canidae. However, unlike gray foxes, they can’t climb trees, which is a blessing for us all.