I saw tarantulas there too, and now they are a regular part of my autumn drives. I see them advancing slowly and elegantly, crossing the roads or crawling down the driveway, large furry bodies arched above the stately-stepping legs. They are looking for sex, but they have the aspect of a regal progress. I carefully swerve aside. Other drivers are less respectful, and I look sadly at the furry brown carcass mounds as I drive past.
EB tells me that when she first arrived she had a huge spider phobia. I lost that phobia when I lived in the milk barn on Taylors Ferry Rd, back in the late '80s. My bed was in the loft, among the rafters, where huge barn spiders lived. I watched them warily for awhile, but they stayed on their side, and I stayed on mine. They took care of the flying insects and the silverfish, so I let them be.
EB isn't so accepting of the Epod spiders, but she doesn't kill them. She uses the glass and cardboard technique. You wait patiently for the spider to reach your level, plop the glass over it, rim tight against the wall or floor, ease a thin cardboard or paper underneath, being careful not to nip a leg or squish a body part, bolster the paper with a clipboard (to prevent flopping and gaps), and escort the offending arachnid outdoors. The tricky part is when you remove the glass: will the spider leap onto your face and bite?! I suggest a plastic glass, so she can just fling the whole thing into the brush and retrieve the equipment later.
Right now the Epod is home to several varieties of arachnid. At any moment cone can see them marching around the ceiling, popping out by the bathroom sink, scuttling across the tile, crawling into crevices. I don't know their names, but one kind has a thin grey body with two hornlike front legs, another has a thick black body with stubby legs like eyelashes, a third has a long black body with a reddish brown abdomen (not the fiddle shaped black widow). EB has even encountered a small scorpion. It came scurrying out of the broom closet in the bathroom, and when she pinned it under the glass, it shriveled and changed color. She decided it was killed in the process and tossed it down the toilet, but now she thinks it may have been a defense mechanism, and she is racked with guilt.
I don't go that far.
The insects have cycles in the house. Spiders are a constant, but in the summer, the crickets invade regularly, filling the bathroom with echoing calls, undeniably present, but unfindable. It keeps me awake, and I whine about it on Facebook:
The stridulator
Came out of hiding tonight.
It is outside now.
Outside, cicadas fill the air with their mating calls, loud and monotonous. These are not the fat night-time cicadas of my youth. Those used to congregate on the lighted tennis courts and stoops, massively ugly, with a singing cricket-like song. When I moved to New Mexico, they lived in the cottonwoods and, on one memorable evening, drowned out the band on the stage at the Biopark concert and dive-bombed my hair. But the cicada on this high-desert mountain confounds me. It fills the hot mid-day afternoon with a endless percussive clicking, produced by wing-clicks instead of the more resonant abdominal tymbal. I learn that it's a periodical cicada, a smaller variety with a 17-year life cycle, spent mainly underground. This is he year of a population explosion. It takes weeks before I track down the source of the sound, even though they are inches away from me.
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| After much peering Into clicking junipers, I locate the source |
A friend commented, "OMG, Now I remember why I am not fond of the hot dry places." Well, yes, but it's fascinating, too, and they don't harm you, unless, like C, you shake the limb to watch them scatter into the air. One of them bit her, and serves her right.
Amazing and ever-present in their various shapes and often-noxious qualities, the insects are still not something I study carefully. I mainly learn how to co-exist, how to escort them outside, and how to avoid them. The beautiful two-toned tarantula wasp feeds on the yellow flowers, unmolested. I walk too close to the matte-black stink bug, and it points its abdomen upward, warning me away. I take pictures of bees and flies as they burrow into the cactus blossoms. They are there, they are often beautiful, but I don't really like them.
When I first arrived here, I was more interested in the larger wildlife. C showed me the bear scrape in the parking circle: long ridges in the dirt that didn't look like much, but were the bear's attempt to find insects to eat. She also explained how to differentiate mountain lion scat from coyote scat: the former has a corkscrew quality. This is the closest I have been to those mammals. Sometimes on my evening walks I hear a yipping or a howling out of the scrub, down the hill. I'm never sure if it's a coyote or a lost dog: Reina and Tessa regularly roam the mountain, and Reina often gets lost. When she appears without Tessa on our doorsteps, we call her into the car and take her half a mile down the hill to her home. She sits in the back, ears alert, tongue panting through her smiling mouth. We pull into the drive and open the door and she leaps out, then looks up, reproachfully. This is it? "Yes, go home." Slowly and sadly, she walks down the drive, looking back once to see if we've changed our minds. "Go on!"
Last winter, we hosted a nightly supper party for the foxes. We discovered by accident that they were partial to birdseed, and we began scattering the seed on the portal. Chipmunks and birds took their share of the bounty during the day, and the foxes came out in the dusk. The mother was very cautious, watching for movement through the doors, but the two kits were braver. E was enthralled, and mourned when they stopped appearing. "Are they alright? Where did they go?"
In another month, we will be putting the feeders out again, and hopefully the foxes will return. Right now, though, it's still rattlesnake season. I haven't seen a single one, but C has pointed out their holes, and she has seen the long tube-like paths they take to the shady regions under the greenhouse. We do what we can to not attract them to our homes, and when we walk we keep an eye on the shady bushes and rocks.
The birds are the most overt presences. In the spring, we monitor the thrush nest in C and M's front porch rafters. The mother circles, shrieking at our presence as her chicks whine for food. In the summer, the high-pitched squeaks of the hummingbirds and their WWII airplane buzzing fill the air. They dominate the landscape as they dart and skirmish around the feeders and hover at their reflections in the windows. High overhead, the crows soar. Western scrub jays perch in the tree tops, Occasionally we hear the mournful coo of the white winged rock doves. But the smaller, more social birds are not in evidence yet.
Still, for the most part the desert creatures are shy and unobtrusive. Dead mice, captured inside and flung under an outside bush, are gone within ten minutes, but you never see the snake that took them. EB says that one day when they left the house, she saw crows or vultures clustered on the road, and, as they lifted into the air at her approach, she saw the mangled remains of a rabbit. Upon her return, 4 hours later, there was no sign of the blood and violence. The desert had cleaned itself, presenting a smiling emptiness to the gaze. Clouds sail serenely overhead, casting moving shadows on the trees and flowery underbrush and rocks, but you have to be very alert to see the animal life that prospers within.
Perhaps that's the enduring magic of this place. It contains multitudes, and every day is a discovery adventure, repetitive and new at the same time.
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