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Wild Animals I Have Known… in the Finger Lakes (Part 2!)

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Last month we blogged about interesting wildlife encounters from 27 years of living in the Finger Lakes. One thing I should mention is, that the animals came to me, or at least we blundered upon each other. My point is that much as I love seeing the wildlife, I try very hard not to bother them. Close encounters are nerve-wracking for them, and potentially dangerous for both of us. Social distancing is the way to go!

*That might have been good advice for a red fox I encountered while hiking the Bristol Hills Trail through Hugh Tor, near Naples. At this point the Trail took advantage of an old farm lane, on which we were walking converging courses. He had his head down, schlepping along, until I was about the make my presence known, when all at once he jerked his head up, gaped in astonishment, and lit out for the high timber. I must have interrupted some deep philosophical contemplation.

*Beavers are making a comeback! Forests are up, trapping is down, and stream qualities have been improving. The first good look I ever got at a beaver was in Boughton Park, near Holcomb. He was standing on his hind feet on a log in water, leaning his chest on a branch, and reaching over the branch to strip twigs from the tree, gnawing at them to his heart’s content… he was busy as a beaver. When we first moved to Bath we could watch them from the road near Risingville, and at a farm pond between Wayne and Hammondsport. Like the Lone Ranger, they move on when their job (damming streams) is done. There’s always another stream, just over the next rise.

*I also met some interesting woodchucks near Bath. Right in the village I frequently saw a ‘chuck that was terrified of cats, even though he probably outweighed them two to one. I knew another one that threw up a little parapet for himself, in a slope near Pleasant Valley on State Route 54, and spent his days enjoying the sun and watching the traffic. When we lived on Mitchellsville Road I used to watch a woodchuck from a second-floor window. He was also across the back yard, putting a good amount of distance between us. But as I watched him, he watched me. Just raising my hand would send him scurrying for the safety of his burrow. They must have excellent eyesight.

*I once caught a glimpse of a fisher on the Finger Lakes Trail, west of Mitchellsville. And one night a bobcat scooted across Cold Brook Road in front of our car. It’s been quite recently that either of these predators have moved into our neighborhood in any numbers. There are even experimental hunting and trapping seasons nowadays.

*I’ve read that many European visitors, spotting squirrels on our lawns, are flabbergasted that “wild animals” come up so close to the houses. The gray squirrel is our most common model, but the gray has a naturally-occurring black variant. I see them near Birdseye Hollow Park, and up at Mossy Bank Park, and lately I see them in greater numbers and wider ranges. A friend tells me that the black version was the more common type hundreds of years ago… grays came to the fore as the forest was cut down. Now that so much more of our land is once again forested, blacks are making a comeback – the better to hide beneath the shade of the forest canopy.

Our Changing Wildlife

“The times change, and we are changed with them.”

The Latin saying speaks sooth. “Change and decay in all around we see.” Sometimes change is sad, and sometimes it’s scary. But it’s sometimes exciting, often fascinating, and always inevitable.

In the space of a couple of weeks recently I saw several deer… a wild turkey… a beaver dam… and some black squirrels.

All of them represented CHANGE here in the Finger Lakes and Southern Tier. In parts of our region deer are so plentiful that they’ve become a nuisance, and Steuben beats every other county in the state for deer take during hunting season. But there are old men and old women who remember being taken from school and put onto a bus so that they could be taken to a field where they would see that exciting rarity… a deer.

Much of our region was cleared for farming by 1900 or so, and much of our native wildlife had disappeared. As farming dwindled after World War II, the forest came back, and with it came the fauna.

With the deer came the turkey. It’s not unusual to find them along main roads and back roads alike. I know two spots within five miles of Bath where the flocks roost in trees along the Finger Lakes Trail. They’re forest birds, and they come with the trees. Just as Steuben is number one in the deer hunt, it’s consistently in New York’s top five for turkey take.

As the turkey increase, the pheasants decrease. Ring-necked pheasants are an Asian species, introduced after 1900 as a game bird, since the turkeys had vanished. (The state raised them at Bath Fish Hatchery.) But pheasants are a field bird. More trees, more turkeys. Fewer fields, fewer pheasants.

More TREES also mean more BEAVER. The last quarter of the 20th century saw their busy families return in delightful numbers… though of course they can be a nuisance when their dams flood our homes or our highways.

Our son and I observed a lot more black squirrels this year. Black fur is a natural morph for the gray squirrel, but why were their numbers going up? I’m told, by someone I’ve consistently found knowledgeable, that most squirrels were black when the first Europeans arrived – it provided camouflage in the shaded forest. Gray fur did better in open fields, and proportions swung in that direction. As more squirrels live again in forests, the numbers swing the other way.

As with the deer, the turkey, and the beaver, so with the black bear. Fifteen years ago the Encyclopedia of New York State estimated about 200 bear in the Alleghenies of the Southern Tier, where they were creeping across the state line from Pennsylvania. It’s a whale of a lot more than that now, as they’ve spread throughout the reforested parts of the Finger Lakes, and extended their range eastward to meet the westward-growing population from the Catskills.

Fishers and bobcats have taken so much advantage of the returning forest that we now have hunting and trapping seasons.

One native animal that has NOT returned since being hunted to extinction is the wolf. But the wolf’s absence, along with farmland going fallow, opened the door for the highly adaptive coyote, which is now perfectly at home in most of the state, field and forest alike, and even makes incursions into cities.

Besides the turkeys, other birds have ebbed and flowed with the changes. Cardinals, once rare above the Mason-Dixon line, have become commonplace, partly due to widespread planting of the decorative multiflora rosa since World War II, providing a year-round food source. They’ve also profited from global warming has made our winters less severe.

The Canada goose has also benefited from global warming, as grain is now grown much farther north in Canada than ever before, and their numbers boom. In many communities they now stay put all year. But their haunting call on their southward journey is still the herald of winter to come, and summer slipping away.