Fangs for the Memories
Might as well grin and bear it: In Southwest New Mexico, the wildlife is living large.
An older Hispanic gentleman appeared at our door the other day to warn us about a bear across the street. Evidently he'd been driving down our road and spotted the silhouette of a black bear in the neighbors' yard. A conscientious citizen but no fool, he'd opted to pull into our driveway — across the road from the bear — to sound the alarm.
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It was so kind of him to stop that we went out of our way to reassure him that we, too, had originally been fooled by what turns out to be a bear-shaped archery target. The first time we noticed the "bear," we'd dug out the binoculars to get a better look. What should we do? We were about to call Larry Lightner, our intrepid "Ramblin' Outdoors" columnist, for advice, when it dawned on us that the "bear" in the binoculars had yet to move. Further binocular-boosted study led us to conclude that the "bear" was incapable of movement, unless its owner picked up the target and hauled it somewhere.
A bit deflated, we turned and went back into the house. Wouldn't our neighbor have been surprised, though, if Larry Lightner had pulled up and blasted the "bear"?
Similarly, our Good Samaritan passerby returned to his car and resumed his journey. I hope he realized we appreciated his concern, even though it was a false alarm.
Living in New Mexico, after all, you just never know. A few weeks before, folks in Pinos Altos were plagued by an overfriendly bear that authorities eventually decided to shoot. Just today, I read about a man who was bitten in the butt at the Cliff Dwellings.
And it's not just bears. Larry somewhat gleefully informed us the other day that one of the photos he'd previously shown us of especially nasty-looking rattlesnakes had been snapped just a quarter-mile or so from our house. Thanks for the nightmares, Lar.
The thing we've learned about wildlife in southwest New Mexico is that, while it's generally not as omnipresently annoying as the pests in other places we've lived, when critters (as Larry would say) do intrude, they tend to be bigger and badder. Other places, for example, you have mosquitoes in swarms that make it impossible to sit out at twilight; here, we make up for the comparative lack of tiny, flying bloodsuckers by the occasional appearance of a bear in your backyard. Or a rattlesnake. Or a javelina.
Or a tarantula. We finally had our first close-up tarantula sighting — a real one, not a tarantula target or other false alarm. My wife had spotted tarantulas before crossing the road, which gives you some idea of how big these spiders must be. (Why did the tarantula cross the road? To bite on the other side?) But we'd never been within fang distance of one until last week.
My wife was coming into the house from our attached garage when she spotted the tarantula clinging to the doorframe, just above where she would have reached for the handle. Presumably the tarantula was coming into the house, too, if we'd let it. And since my wife had just moments before passed out of the house into the garage, presumably she'd strolled right past it.
I should add here that only the day before the lock on the door into the garage went kerfluey (that's a technical locksmithing term, I believe) and had to be rather vigorously replaced. The repair left a doorknob-sized hole in the door for about a day, which in retrospect we couldn't help imagining a tarantula crawling through: Thanks for the invitation, folks! How do you like my fangs?
To her credit, although a tad startled, my wife did not panic, scream and run. That would have been me. Nor did she whack wildly at the tarantula, at best splattering it messily all over the doorframe and at worst sending it skittering for cover. Coolly, she picked up an empty CD case — the kind with a spindle that holds a hundred blank CD-ROMs — and used it to imprison the tarantula. (Never mind what it says about our household that we just happen to have an empty container for a hundred blank CDs lying around within easy reach. The tarantula's lucky she didn't smoosh it with a spare hard drive.)
Once captured in a conveniently clear plastic cage, the tarantula was suitable for my aghast inspection (I was outside, keeping a lookout for bears). My wife also took time to consult one of the several field guides to local critters that we keep handy (always good to know exactly what is biting, stinging, poisoning or chomping you). Our tarantula turned out to be a young male, which she determined by noting its black legs and red abdomen; female tarantulas, evidently, have brown legs. Hideous, hairy, huge brown legs like something out of a horror movie. . . but I digress.
Our tarantula was also a bit on the small side — though plenty big enough for me, thanks very much — so she decided it was probably still a young'un. Still growing, in other words. Growing huger and scarier.
Having done her biological duty, my wife flung the tarantula far down the hill. I only wish she'd taken a picture first, so I could have properly illustrated this column. With any luck, the stunned but still living — and did I mention growing!? — tarantula will make another appearance in our house before this issue goes to press. Then we can get a photo and I can scream "I told you so!" before squishing it with the largest, heaviest object I can lay my hands on.
It's not just the pests that seem to grow bigger in New Mexico. (Before moving here, I thought a daddy longlegs was a big, ugly spider.) I've opined previously about the jackrabbits, which have recently returned to our backyard to show up their small cottontail cousins. People who've never seen jackrabbits before can't quite grasp the size of these things, which are like small dogs with ears as big as kohlrabi leaves. Charming though they are, it's still a bit disconcerting to see a jackrabbit loping through the yard. (What if they decided to attack en masse? "You've screwed up the planet enough, puny humans! It's our turn now!")
The deer are bigger here, too, of course. Used to the slight, ghostlike creatures flitting through the dusk of other places we've lived, we were startled by our first glimpse of mule deer. (We've yet to see an elk, however, despite all the elk-crossing highway signs. We're beginning to think these are just some elaborate hoax.)
In recent weeks we seem also to have acquired our own resident mule deer, a female recognizable on repeat appearances by a notched ear. (My guess is that the tarantula recommended us as good hosts.) My wife has named it "Deirdre."
I first spotted Deirdre out back, after dinner, munching apples from the profusion weighing down our trees this year. That's how we've most often seen her, in fact — sometimes just four legs that seem to be reaching down, disembodied, from the lower branches of an apple tree. The fact that Deirdre's body can be hidden by the tree leaves gives you an idea of how tall the deer must be (or how badly our apple trees need trimming).
Perhaps the tendency of our wildlife to extremes is a response to the extremes of the terrain and climate. We don't have acre after acre of generic, featureless green as in other places. Instead, you can go miles without encountering any foliage taller than waist-high — and then, wherever there's the slightest hint of water, suddenly a grove of towering cottonwoods appears. Months can pass without a drop of rain — and then the monsoons arrive and it floods. Prickly-pear cactus spend most of the year looking like some sort of vegetation from the time when dinosaurs ruled the earth; then, unexpectedly, they produce the prettiest blossoms. Hillsides in the Bootheel, which ordinarily must have looked daunting even to the Apache who hid behind them, suddenly sprout millions of tiny orange poppy flowers.
It's probably easier to cope with these mood swings of Mother Nature if you have some size on you. "Delicate" doesn't last long in these parts, unless it's attached to something with several feet of sharp spikes.
I'm not complaining, mind you, despite the occasional tarantula scare. (It's out there, somewhere, biding its time. . . .) The largeness of local wildlife tends to inspire equally large responses in the viewer, and awe mostly supercedes terror. We live in an outsized part of the world, where the soul and our relationship with nature are encouraged to be equally expansive.
Who knows? Maybe next time we'll have a real bear.
David A. Fryxell is editor of Desert Exposure.