Exotic rat at Point Reyes

This week I shot a rat. With my camera, that is. To be precise, I photographed a roof rat foraging under a flowerpot for stray birdseed. It was a lucky shot, for an instant after I snapped the picture, the rat was gone.

For 30 years, I have been aware of roof rats on this hill, for they have sometimes made themselves known in a particularly disruptive fashion.

It typically happens this way; every few years, a resident of Campolindo Drive turns on the dishwasher only to have soapy water spread across the kitchen floor. (If memory serves, it happened to my late neighbors Ben and Charlotte Glading twice, to my neighbors Dan and Mary Huntsman once, and to me twice.)

Inverness applicance repairman Dave Brast this week explained what’s been going on: “There’s one hose that drains a dishwasher, and usually it goes through a hole in the cabinet wall that separates the dishwasher nook from the space under the kitchen sink. If the sink drain goes through the wall under and behind the sink and if that hole is overly large for the drainpipe (thereby leaving a gap), a rodent can crawl from inside the wall through the gap into the under-sink space and then through the hole in the cabinet wall over to the dishwasher nook…”

(For roof rats to “enter homes and buildings,” The New York Times-owned website About.com notes, “they only need a hole the size of a quarter.”)

Brast further explained, “To do damage by gnawing through the dishwasher drain hose, the rodent can gnaw the portion of the hose under the sink or under or behind the dishwasher.

“I think the hose in the nook is the favorite target because there the rodent is completely protected from being disturbed by cats, dogs and humans….

“In the last few weeks I’ve had to repair two rat-gnawed dishwasher-drain hoses in Bolinas, one at the home of Aggie Murch and the other at the home of Charles and Veronique Fox. The two houses are on opposite sides of the road just a few hundred yards apart. The first gnawing was in the Murch house and days later in the Fox house.

“This made us wonder if it wasn’t the same rat doing the gnawing. After it gnawed through the first hose, it thought, “Well, no more to gnaw here at Murch’s. Guess I’ll mosey on over to Fox’s and see what there is to gnaw there…. Another dishwasher-hose gnawing I remember happened to Herb and Gina Kutchins’ [Inverness Park] dishwasher.”

Why do roof rats do this? “My understanding is that rodents gnaw because they have to,” Brast told me. “If they didn’t, the front teeth, which never stop growing, would get so long the animal wouldn’t be able to open its mouth wide enough to eat.” In short, it’s a dental procedure.

And there are more serious reasons for not wanting roof rats in our kitchens than periodically sudsy floors.

As reflected in their grating scientific name Rattus rattus, roof rats are notorious creatures. I’m reminded of Nabokov naming Lolita’s stepfather Humbert Humbert emphasize that rat’s ugly nature.

“The roof rat is an introduced species of rat [that is] native to southern Asia,” the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Science notes. (Florida has a particular problem with roof rats in citrus groves.) “It was brought to America on the first ships to reach the New World.”

“The rat is the same species that carried the bubonic plague around the world [killing half the people in Europe during the late 1340s] and is also the host for murine typhus” in the South.

Cats kill roof rat “pups” but seldom the adults. Charlie cat seen here fence sitting belongs to neighbors Jay Haas and Didi Thompson, whose dishwasher has thus far escaped rat damage. Whether Charlie should get the credit, however, is unclear.

Because roof rats (which like to gnaw their way into attics) are arboreal, traveling along branches, utility lines, and fence tops, they seldom fall prey to cats except when the pups are young and still dispersing, the University of Florida notes.

Traps are more effective in controlling roof rats.

Hawks, such as this redtail on my hill, and owls (especially barn owls) are even better, the University of Florida reports.

A female roof rat can have as many as five litters a year of up to eight pups each. And each generation is ready to begin reproducing in three to four months.

For the past two centuries, rats have been a fact of life on every continent but Antarctica.

The so-called Norway rats or “sewer rats” (Rattus norvegicus) are actually native to northern China. They reached Europe and the Americas from Asia much later than roof rats. The University of Michigan Museum of Zoology reports they were inadvertently carried on ships to Europe in the early 1700s and the New World in the 1770s.

In Asia, Rattus norvegicus was native to forests and brushy areas, the museum notes. Today, however, Norway rats find preferred habitat to be alongside the rapid expansion of the human population. Nearly every port city in the world has a substantial population of these rodents.

I happened to have been reporting for the old San Francisco Examiner back in 1982-83 when the City of San Francisco reconditioned its cable car tracks and, while it was at it, replaced antiquated sewer lines underneath.

A supervising engineer on the sewer project told me at the time that he and another employee had recently gone into a sewer tunnel under Market Street at the edge of the Financial District. The tunnel opened into a large chamber, he said, and as the two of them shone their flashlights around the tiered vault, they saw reflections from eyes of hundreds of rats. The two men beat a hasty retreat. A typical city, the engineer noted, has one rat for every human.

In case you have your own encounter with a representative of the genus rattus and wonder just what species you’re dealing with, the easiest way to distinguish between Norway rats and roof rats is by the length of their tails.

Norway rat tails are shorter than their bodies while the tail of a roof rat is noticeably longer than its body. Norway rats have bald ears. The ears of roof rats are furry. Norway rats are only slightly longer than roof rats; in fact the rattus rattus above would probably measure more than a foot from the tip of its nose to the tip of its tail. In general, however, Norway rats are far heftier.

Flashing wildlife makes some nature photography possible that would otherwise be difficult at best. *

The results of flashing, however, can be gratifying or frustrating, depending on how one sees things. Flashes often give humans red eye, and I don’ t mean conjunctivitis (AKA pink eye). In fact, possums are the species that end up with pink eye in flash photography. Blacktail deer come out with blue eye while raccoon eyes can end up white or green or both.

A blacktail fawn gets “blue eye,” not “red eye,” from being flashed.

(For the edification of readers in other parts of the country, I should note that flash photography can make prairie dog eyes look orange and alligator eyes look red.)

However, the reason flashes, which are often vital for photographing nocturnal wildlife, give these animals’ eyes their various colors is not the same reason flashes can make human eyes look red.

The eyeshine of possums is pink.

Among mammals, the iris of the eye expands and contracts to let in the optimum amount of light as conditions become darker or brighter. When a camera flashes, the human iris cannot contract fast enough to keep bright light from reaching the back of the eye; as a result, red blood vessels of the retina reflect light and show up in photos as red eye.

Unlike humans, many other mammals, especially nocturnal creatures, have a mirror-like surface, the tapetum lucidum, behind their retinas. The eyeshine of a deer caught in the headlights is a reflection off the tapetum lucidum.

The tapetum lucidum helps nocturnal animals hunt and forage in low light. Here’s how. Light from outside the eye passes through the iris and the retina and then bounces off the tapetum lucidum back through the retina. This magnifies the intensity of the light reaching the rods and cones of the retina, which are what sense light.

However, the color of the tapetum lucidum differs from species to species, which is why rabbits have orange or red eyeshine while dogs are often green or blue.

Showing both green and white eyeshine, a raccoon looks through my kitchen door at Nina Howard of Point Reyes Station.

Nor is having a tapetum lucidum an unmixed blessing. As Wikipedia notes, the tapetum lucidum improves vision in low light conditions but can cause the perceived image to be blurry from the interference of the reflected light.

And then there are other curiosities. The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources reports, “Animals in which the views of the two eyes overlap a lot, such as people and owls have good stereoscopic vision [which helps them gauge distances]. Animals whose vision overlaps less, such as deer and rabbits, have less stereoscopic vision, but they can see more around them.”

Not all animals have round pupils like those of human eyes. In the same way we squint to see more clearly, some animals’ pupils are naturally narrow to sharpen their vision, perhaps somewhat offsetting any blurring their tapetum lucidum might cause.

The pupils of foxes and small cats, for example, are vertical slits, which help these predators notice when any prey is scurrying around off to their sides. The pupils of goats, sheep, and deer are horizontal slits, as can be seen in bright light; this gives them better vertical vision on steep terrain.

When I spotted a blacktail doe grazing in the shade of a pine tree outside my bedroom, I opened a window to take a picture. The doe looked up and saw me, but she appeared oblivious to being flashed and went back to grazing. Notice her horizontal pupils.

Surprisingly, wildlife including birds do not usually show any reaction to sporadic flashes — even those directly in their faces— but a quick succession of flashes gets their attention.

“By means of water, We [God] gave life to everything.”  The Qur’an

My two acres adjoin the land of Point Reyes Station’s venerable Toby Giacomini, and one of the stockponds on his property is only 10 yards from our common fence. Living next to that pond for the last 30 years has been an education. Livestock such as cows and horses have long watered there, of course, but the stockpond also provides habitat for an amazing array of wildlife.

Red-winged blackbirds from a colony that nests at Toby’s Giacomini’s stockpond near my cabin flock in whenever I put out birdseed.

Threatened Western pond turtles have found refuge in Toby’s stockpond. The pond provides a home for newts, frogs, snakes, various fish, and a colorful colony of Red-winged blackbirds.

Deer, foxes, and raccoons frequently drop by for a drink. Badgers, and an occasional coyote, can be found around it.

Here a Great Blue Heron picks its way through the reeds along the edge of the stockpond.

Among the birds that can be frequently seen hunting for dinner at Toby’s pond are several varieties of duck.

In addition, an occasional goose or two shows up although I’m more likely to spot them overhead.

However, as far as I’m concerned, the true celebrity hunters are the Great Blue Herons.

Having these long-legged stalkers around the cabin is exciting.

I’ve lived in small, rural towns for 35 years, but I still get a thrill when a heron lands next to my parked car and then goes hunting in the field just below my deck.

Great Blue Heron on the prowl in my pasture.

For the sake of birds that don’t hang out around the pond, I provide a birdbath on my deck where these living dinosaurs* can drink as well as bathe.

A mourning dove in my birdbath takes a drink while a brown towhee eats seed and waits its turn.

“Well, I’ll be a dirty bird,” George Gobel (1919-91). Splashing wildly, a brown towhee becomes practically submerged in my birdbath while cleaning up.

Although not the only species to bathe on my deck, none do it with more enthusiasm than brown towhees. It so happens that I too like a good soaking now and then, and more than once while half-dozing in the hot tub on my lower deck I’ve been abruptly awakened by a shower of cold water from a towhee splashing in the birdbath a deck above me.

A blacktail buck in the glow of late afternoon sun as the days grow short.

It was one of those moments when reality becomes surreal, as if the natural world suddenly went running off in all directions. Which is sort of what happened.

As I was about to leave my cabin to get my mail at the post office, something told me this would be a good day to carry my camera in my pocket. So I did. Nothing happened downtown worth photographing, but when I was driving back up my long, curved driveway, I was suddenly glad to have my camera with me.

Near the top of my driveway, I startled a herd of blacktail deer grazing just downhill from my cabin, and they did what deer typically do in these circumstances. The herd ran in front of my car. I was proceeding slowly, however, so they safely made it into a field on the other side of the driveway where they stopped.

Wild turkeys hunt and peck their way across my field.

As it happened, a flock of 12 wild turkeys were already in that field, and when they saw my car approaching, the turkeys just as perversely scurried across my driveway in the opposite direction.

Both were so intent on where they were heading that the flock and herd dashed past each other without seeming to notice there was a discrepancy as to where safety could be found.

A dozen wild turkeys forage downhill from my cabin.

Once they’d passed each other on the driveway, bird and deer both slowed to a walk, and I was able to photograph the turkeys as they marched across the field below my cabin.

Wild turkeys are not native to California. In 1988, California’s Department of Fish and Game planted three toms and 11 hens for hunting at Loma Alta Ranch (on the ridge between Woodacre and Lucas Valley Road).

From there the turkeys spread to nearby Flanders Ranch and the Spirit Rock property, and eventually to Nicasio, Olema, and even as far north as Tomales, where they have been known to intimidate small children and scratch the paint of cars on which they perch.

In February 2005, a low-flying turkey gliding across Highway 1 in downtown Tomales hit a power line, causing three lines to slap together and fall to the ground. The town was blacked out for four hours, but the turkey, albeit initially stunned and walking around in circles, suffered only a few singed feathers and eventually wandered off.

After the commotion has died down, a fawn peers
around her mother’s neck at the departing turkeys.

I found this garter snake one morning warming itself in the sun on my driveway. Common garter snakes come in innumerable variations and are found in fields, forests and wetlands nationwide. Like this snake, adults average about four feet long. In West Marin, their diet typically consists of tadpoles, slugs, and earthworms. But unlike other snakes, they don’t eat insects. When first born, the snakes are prey for bullfrogs. Hawks and foxes eat adults.

Pacific tree frog hiding out in leaves from my persimmon tree.

Pacific tree frogs’ chirping is so dependable that Hollywood typically uses it whenever the sound of frogs is needed in a movie, even if it’s set in Africa.

The website NaturePark.com reports that the tree frog’s “color varies from almost a bronze brown to a light lime green. Individuals can change color in green and brown tones in a few minutes. This color change is related to the temperature and amount of moisture in the air, not the background color as in most other amphibians and reptiles. This color change gives it the protection of camouflage as it hops and crawls about on low leaves, branches and on the ground in open forests and forest edges looking for flying and crawling insects to eat.”

I photographed three lizards on the wall of my cabin and then was unable to find any naturalist either in town or at the Point Reyes National Seashore who could identify the green lizard at lower left.

I also checked the website wildherps.com operated by herpetologist John Sullivan of Pacific Grove. When I didn’t see the green lizard on his site, I emailed Sullivan photos of the three and asked for help. His answer: “I believe all three of your lizards are actually Western Fence Lizards (Sceloporus occidentalis). They have a fair amount of color variation, and the green one is within the range of colors I’ve seen.”

Charlotte’s Web (below). Every fall I can count on some garden orb weaver each evening stretching a web from my eaves to the railing of my deck near the front-door light.

“The building of a web is an engineering feat,” as Wikipedia aptly notes. The orb weaver “floats a line on the wind to another surface. The spider secures the line and then drops another line from the center, making a Y.

“The rest of the scaffolding follows with many radii of non-sticky silk being constructed before a final spiral of sticky capture silk.

“Orb weavers are three-clawed spiders, and the third claw is used to walk on the non-sticky part of the web.

“Characteristically, the prey insect that blunders into the sticky lines is stunned by a quick bite and then wrapped in silk. If the prey is a venomous insect, such as a wasp, wrapping may precede biting.”

Possums are found throughout West Marin wherever ponds, creeks, marshes, and even drainage ditches provide riparian habitat.

I photographed this possum when it stopped on my deck to wash its paws.

West Marin’s possums originated in the Deep South where “common opossums” are commonly called possums, thanks to a linguistic phenomenon known as aphesis.

“The common opossum,” writes Point Reyes Station biologist Jules Evens in The Natural History of the Point Reyes Peninsula, is “the only marsupial native to North America [but] is not native to Point Reyes or the Pacific Coast. After the first known introduction into California at San Jose about 1900 (for meat, delicious with sweet potatoes), opossums spread rapidly southward: by 1931 they were common on the coastal slope from San Francisco Bay south to the Mexican border. Point Reyes avoided the onslaught until about 1968.” They are nocturnal omnivores, eating plants, earthworms, slugs, insects, and roadkill.

“A perfectly preserved fossil of a feathered creature that lived 150 million years ago has provided further evidence to show that modern birds are living dinosaurs. The fossil is a complete skeleton of an Archaeopteryx and shows it had features common to birds and a group of meat-eating dinosaurs called therapods.” The Independent (London)

There are dinosaurs living on the two acres around my cabin. This is not metaphor but fact, as scientists from around the world have confirmed. Naturally, I hate to see any prehistoric reptile going hungry, so I buy dinosaur food at Toby’s Feed Barn in 50-pound sacks. The dinosaurs at my cabin get fed twice daily, thus requiring a new sack every fortnight.

Putting out seeds for the dinosaurs and then watching them show up, chow down, and start fighting provide me with a prehistoric world of entertainment. I’d much rather watch this twice-a-day drama than anything on television.

Canada geese fly over my cabin each evening en route from Tomales Bay to the larger of two ponds at the Cheese Factory in Hicks Valley, where many of West Marin’s Canada geese spend nights. Hundreds of Canada geese winter annually on the bay, on Nicasio Reservoir, and at Bolinas Lagoon. Along with these snowbirders, a year-round population of Canada geese is developing in West Marin. The fulltimers are descendants of geese that people over the years have dropped off at the Cheese Factory’s smaller pond, which is beside the picnic area. This began with an unidentified Johnny Apple-Goose releasing (with permission) four geese with clipped wings at the pond in the 1970s. Seeing those four, other people were then inspired to start dropping off their own surplus Canada geese (not always with the Cheese Factory’s permission).

The dinosaurs around my two acres are mostly songbirds, jays, blackbirds, herons, crows, vultures, and hawks while Canada geese honk overhead. This may sound odd, but as the website of New York City’s American Museum of Natural History explains: “In the view of most paleontologists today, birds are living dinosaurs. In other words, the traits that we accept as defining birds, key skeletal features as well as behaviors including nesting and brooding,  actually first arose in some dinosaurs.”

Professor Mike Archer, director of the Australian Museum in Sydney, told ABC in 2002, “Fossils uncovered in the Liaoning Province of China have provided a whole sequence of missing links in the dinosaur-to-bird story. The birds we see flying around our backyards are actually living dinosaurs, descendants of prehistoric beasts we all once presumed became extinct 65 million years ago.” In fact, not every scientist had shared that presumption. The

With its bird brain, a red-winged blackbird has the mind of a dinosaur. Ninety percent of red-winged blackbird males have more than one mate, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology reports, “with one male having up to 15 different females making nests in his territory. [He] fiercely defends his territory during the breeding season [and] may spend more than a quarter of all the daylight hours in territory defense.” He doesn’t get much cooperation, however, from his female consorts. The ornithologists at Cornell report, “From one quarter to up to half of the young in his nests do not belong to the territorial male. Instead they have been sired by neighboring males.”

Chinese fossils of nesting dinosaurs with rudimentary feathers have made many laymen finally realize birds are indeed dinosaurs, not creatures that evolved from dinosaurs but true dinosaurs. However, for more than a century there were always some scientists convinced of this.

Responding to renewed interest in the concept following the Chinese discoveries, Yale University two years ago proudly pointed out that “in 1880, Charles Darwin credited O.C. Marsh, Yale’s first professor of Paleontology, with further research on ‘toothed birds’ (dinosaurs) that provided the best support for his theory of evolution.”

And while it’s amusing to talk in terms of dinosaurs eating birdseed on my deck, realizing that that they are, in fact, reptilian is illuminating. When a crow lands on a railing, it might as well be a Tyrannosaurus Rex as far as the other dinosaurs are concerned; they scatter in panic.

A scrub jay swooping onto my deck strikes the same fear among smaller dinosaurs that the arrival of a malevolent Monolophosaurus (1,500 pounds and carnivorous) would have struck among their prehistoric predecessors. Among like-sized dinosaurs, only the doves, those feisty birds of peace, can hold their own against common jays.

Mealtime generally is fight time for the dinosaurs at my cabin. Fifty or more birds of several species get their beaks in each other’s face as they jostle for position along the 2-by-4 railings where I leave seeds. This reptilian territoriality is especially noticeable among blackbirds, as well as scrub jays (below). Their constant sparring to determine survival of the fittest can, however, work to their disadvantage, for it often causes them to overlook untouched piles of seed nearby.

On the other hand, the sparring of the bigger birds suits the towhees and Oregon juncos just fine. These mellower dinosaurs take their place at the feast as soon as the blackbirds and then the jays drive each other away.

Several dinosaurs are almost as fond of my birdbath as my birdseed, for they drink from the basin as well as bathe in it. Unfortunately, while dinosaurs instinctively avoid dirtying their own nests, they have no similar aversion to fouling their own drinking water. Birdbaths can transmit disease from one dinosaur to another, so I refill mine daily, pouring the old water into flowerpots on my deck. Unlike dinosaurs, flowers benefit from poop in their diet.

The fact that my feathered friends are prehistoric reptiles doesn’t, of course, make them all savage beasts. For example, I call this photo taken on my deck:

Golden-Crowned Sparrow Disguised as a Stained Glass Window

Walt Disney’s 1951 documentary Nature’s Half Acre was unusually successful for having such a simple premise: that there is an amazing spectrum of nature to be found on even a relatively small piece of open property. In fact, the movie’s cast was both huge and small: hundreds of little insects, various birds, spiders and lizards, flowers and other plants galore.

Likewise, the theme of this exhibit is the abundance of plants and animals I’ve managed to photograph from the two acres around my cabin overlooking Point Reyes Station.

Fortunately, the small town (population 820) remains a bit of the Old West despite being only 40 miles north of San Francisco. How much longer the town’s historic charm will last has, however, been uncertain ever since the opening of the Point Reyes National Seashore in 1965. Often now on weekends, the town is overrun with tourists (almost two million per year) en route to the nearby park. The tread of that many visitors on the flora and fauna of this area is crushing in more ways than can be easily imagined. Here, therefore, are some glimpses at what still survives.

A photography collection in progress:

1. Male Western fence lizards do pushups to intimidate rivals, exposing their blue bellies in the process. When under attack, the tip of their tail twitches to draw the predator’s attention away from the body of the lizard. While the lizard can survive the loss of the tip, the loss takes a toll on the lizard which stores food there. The Western fence lizard is pestered by ticks, but when ticks that carry the Lyme Disease spirochete bite a “blue belly,” the spirochete dies.

Photos by Dave Mitchell

2. A raccoon showed up at my kitchen door at Halloween and stood up with a paw on the glass to catch my attention. The young raccoon was obviously used to begging from humans, and given the occasion, I rewarded it with a Halloween cracker.

3. Sunset looking southwest from the deck of my cabin. In the middleground, the setting sun casts a glint off a shiny leaf. In the background is Inverness Ridge, much of which is in the Point Reyes National Seashore.

4. I have blacktail deer on my property throughout the year. I photographed this doe through my dining room window. At some times of the year, as many as 14 blacktails can be found around my cabin at one time.

5. Red foxes are far less common than gray foxes in West Marin; however, they are common in the Sierra, Cascade Mountains, and Central Valley, and there have been red foxes on Point Reyes for many decades. Some may be the descendants of foxes that escaped fox hunts in Nicasio during the 1970s.

6. I found this Pacific Ring-necked snake in a rotten log while splitting firewood. The snake eats very small critters: tadpoles, insects, and especially salamanders, and it has just enough venom to immobilize them. However, the snake is not dangerous to humans.

So you managed to find your way down here. Come on in. Welcome to my digs.

Keeping a log on the web (i.e. a blog) is a bit like keeping a log on a ship. It includes both a journal of one’s trip through life and reports on significant events along the way.

How a web log came to be called a blog, by the way, reflects the whimsy that has long characterized those who gambol on the World Wide Web of the Internet. A blogger named Jorn Barger coined the term in a Dec. 17, 1997, entry on his site, jokingly turning web log into we blog. And who is Jorn Barger? Wikipedia reports he is editor of Robot Wisdom, has taught at Northwestern, once lived at The Farm (Stephen Gaskin’s commune in Tennessee), has written articles criticized as anti-Semitic, and as far back as 1994 offered us bloggers the cautionary observation: “The more interesting your life becomes, the less you post… and vice versa.”

If Barger is right, however, blogging is unique among all the forms of storytelling. When most of us encounter something interesting, we can’t wait to tell others about it.

And that’s what this blog will mostly consist of: stories, comments, and photography that reflect my life and interests as a resident of Point Reyes Station. The purpose of this site is not to be an alternative to The Point Reyes Light, which I formerly owned, although it will periodically comment on the newspaper and, when need be, set the record straight.

But basically I’m more interested in events such as occurred Tuesday morning, Nov. 21, in Chileno Valley. As it happened, I was called upon to be a liaison between six orphaned fawns and two ranchers.

In a facility at her home, Susan Sasso of Olema had raised and rehabilitated the five small bucks and one doe on behalf of WildCare, the San Rafael nonprofit. She does it yearly, and it can be grueling work, feedings every four hours seven days a week when the fawns are newborn; sometimes every two hours when they’re sick. But by last week, the fawns at last were old enough to be released back into nature, and Susan asked me to contact two friends in Chileno Valley. The friends generously agreed to allow the deer to be released on their ranch. They themselves don’t hunt, and their ranch is large enough that the deer can wander over hill and dale without leaving the property. (The ranchers, by the way, have asked me to withhold their names lest I draw hunters to their land.)

The trick was getting the fawns from Olema to Chileno Valley. Early that Tuesday, Susan and another WildCare volunteer, Cindy Dicke also of Olema, gave the fawns injections to sedate them. Mike Vincilione of Point Reyes Station arrived in a pickup truck with camper shell, and the sleeping deer were loaded onto mats and towels in the truckbed. The drive to Chileno Valley took about 40 minutes, with Cindy riding among the deer.

The release itself went amazingly smoothly. Mike drove across a ranch bridge to a pasture bordered by a creek, and there each fawn was lifted gently out of the truck and laid on the grass.

Cindy then gave them all wake-up shots, and the fawns quickly revived. Some were wobbly enough when they first tried to stand that they had to be steadied lest they fall and injure themselves, but this lasted only for a minute or two.

Within roughly 10 minutes, five of the fawns were grazing while one of the bucks kept trying to mount another. It’s not about sex; it’s about domination, Susan explained. (Just like they say about prison, remarked computer guru Keith Matthews of Point Reyes Station when I recounted the incident.)

The fawns have now been on the ranch a week and appear to feel at home, to the point where the domineering buck tried to mount one of the ranchers. When that happens, Susan told her, just slap him. The other fawns are more leery of humans, and after a few more slaps, the lecherous buck probably will be too.

Most of the fawns brought to Susan are too weak to survive, and she loses far more than she saves. Within a year, cars and hunters may kill many of the deer she raises. Nor does West Marin have any shortage of blacktail deer. So why does Susan spend so much time and effort saving the few she can? Susan puts in the long hours simply because she is a humane person. Most of us feel sorry for sick and injured wildlife when we encounter it although we typically don’t see a way to help. Susan has found a way. And lest anyone imagine Susan has some New Age sense of humanity toward sufferers that aren’t human, I should note the Humane Society was founded in 1954 and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals 130 years earlier.