CSI: Wessyngton Road

I think Iain was the first one who noticed them. In the afternoon, we'd see them under the birdfeeders in the back yard - they weren't full grown, and Sarah thought they were cute, but they were absolutely and definitely rats. Fortunately when startled they ran away from the house, toward the wooded area behind the fence, so we didn't think they were actually living in our house. Still, it's not exactly the kind of wildlife you like to see in your backyard, snacking the sunflower seeds that fall from your birdfeeders. The squirrels are bad enough.

But that was a few weeks ago. I haven't seen them for a while. Maybe I just haven't looked at the right time of day.

Then, yesterday afternoon, Iain and I found some clues in the back yard:



Exhibit A.



Exhibit B.

This afternoon we found gray feathers scattered over a large area in the back yard - clumps of feathers (Exhibit A) or individual feathers, of all kinds (Exhibit B). The bird to whom these feathers had been attached had almost certainly been eaten by something - but what? My first thought was a cat. Cats are very effective predators, and a cat certainly could have staked out the bird feeder; Dan used to complain to us when our cat, Rocky, used to stake out their bird feeder. But I don't think I've seen a cat in our back yard since before Rocky died; the very large Labrador retriever who usually is asleep somewhere in the yard may have something to do with the absence of cats in our yard (it certainly kept Rocky away, and he nominally lived here). So, we didn't think it was a cat.

The fact that the feathers were scattered over such a large area suggested at least to me that it was a hawk. A week or two ago Iain and I were walking back from the farmer's market and he spotted one, soaring over the back yards on our side of Wessyngton Road. I've looked, since, and I haven't seen one, but I think at least yesterday it was dining high above my back yard. (I hope that the meal wasn't the catbird I saw at the bird bath the other day.)

In May and June, I watched the red-tailed hawk family in the nest outside the NYU president's office. I started watching soon after the unexpected hatching of Pip (it had been too long, the experts said, none of the eggs are going to hatch), and got anxious when she started wandering around the nest, especially when her mother was out hunting (the experts said she wouldn't fall out, but they were the same ones who said none of the eggs were going to hatch), and then when she finally flew away. But while she was there, we would see her parents would return from hunting with tasty rats, squirrels, and the occasional bird.

I don't know much about hawks - I know that many of the hawks in this area are red-tailed hawks, but I don't know if there are other species too. But I love the idea of a hawk patrolling the neighborhood and dining on rats. For what it's worth, I haven't seen the rats at the bird feeder in a while. I really hope they were lunch. Or maybe dinner, or breakfast.

And I'll keep looking up, to see what I can see.

Teaching the Dog to Read

A couple months ago, on my return from a trip I learned that in my absence Tom had been trying to teach the dog to read.  He said that the dog wasn't making much progress.  On further investigation, I learned that he actually was trying to teach Bullwinkle the alphabet.  I told him that that no doubt was the problem, that the whole language method would probably be more effective than phonics.

Since then, there was an article in the New York Times about Chaser, a border collie that knows the names of more than a thousand objects, along with some additional verbs.  This border collie is owned by a retired psychology professor from Wofford College, who - from the time the dog was a puppy - spent 4 or 5 hours a day teaching the dog words.  Border collies are energetic, smart, obdient, and hard-working, and according to Dr. Pilley, Chaser's owner and teacher, she still demands 4 to 5 hours a day.  "I'm 82," Dr. Pilley told the New York Times, "and I have to go to bed to get away from her."

Now we knew about border collies and their vocabularies before this report; we thought that border collies could learn 400 words, and if border collies could do it, surely Bullwinkle could too. 

Bullwinkle is mature - he's 9 years old in human years - with a graying muzzle and a very sweet disposition.  He is not particularly obdient (see, for example, this and this) and not exactly energetic either, but since he was a puppy he has been in a household where we talk about current events over dinner and we read newspapers and magazines and books, so surely that counts for something.  (Caroline was in a study, the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, and every year or so I would be interviewed by phone.  Whenever they would ask how many children's books were in the house and I said "hundreds," I'm not sure they believed me.)

We do think Bullwinkle knows quite a few words; most of them have to do with food.  He is obsessed with food, and I think if he were given the chance he would eat until he was sick, or worse.

Given his food obsession and his mellow disposition and not-so-active lifestyle ("Caroline, there's a dog on your bed." "There's always a dog on my bed."), it is not surprising that he has a weight problem.  Tom buys the diet dog food, and at least when I feed him I definitely control portions, but he is insufferable when he thinks it's time to be fed. 

This is the thing that I don't understand.  This is a dog that will jump on the dining room table and snatch a loaf of bread or a stick of butter, if given the chance.  But the 40 pound bag of dog food is sitting out in the foyer, next to his bowl - the bowl he will toss across the room if not filled with food when he thinks it should be - and he has never knocked the bag over or tore it open to get into it on his own.  It's not that he doesn't know that's where his food is, and it's not that he couldn't get into it - he just hasn't.

We used to have a cat named Rocky, who decided he didn't like sharing his house with the dog and moved next door to live with Kathy and Steve; he died of cancer a few years ago.  When Rocky was still in our house at least some of the time, we had dry cat food sitting out for him so he could eat when he wanted to.  Bullwinkle started eating Rocky's food, and Rocky - I know this was deliberately done out of spite - did knock over Bullwinkle's close-to-empty bag of food and helped himself to dog food.  At the time, I told Tom this proved that cats are smarter than dogs, but that may not be true; they simply may be more devious.

Bullwinkle may not know more than a dozen words, but one morning when I returned from a before dawn trip to the grocery store, he broke out in frenzied barking that stopped as soon as he saw it was me.  He doesn't have much opportunity to be a watch dog but I am pretty sure if anyone did try to get into the house at night he would be as loud as our alarm system.  He also knows the sound of a half of a dog treat tapped against the back window, and even when he is barking at possums on the other side of the fence, he usually will come running.  Not bad for an middle-aged, overweight Laborador Retriever, even if he can't read.