Indirect Evidence
Much of what we see is direct evidence of the world around us. We see dogs playing, people walking, cars driving as stop lights change from red to green.
But then we also see a lot of indirect evidence of things as well. We notice trees swaying from invisible wind and birds taking off from the ground to flee a predator that only they can sense.
Humans leave all kinds of signs of what they have been up to – that’s the point of every detective novel ever written. This image of tire tracks under a caution sign that’s been bent over backwards make it clear that someone jumped a curb in the parking lot. It might have even happened when the parking lot was icy, as foretold by the sign itself.
But nature is also full of signs of things that happened in the past.
Last year, this shed skin in my backyard showed where a garter snake once went.
A few days ago after snow melted I saw the tracks of deer all over someone’s yard, just a couple of blocks from a big office building.
Vultures are real creatures, of course, but they’re also a sign of some kind of dead creature where they’re feeding. These black vultures I saw earlier this month had found something, possibly the remains of an animal that had been hit on the road behind them. Or possibly a bucket of KFC someone had dumped out of their car window. I didn’t get close enough to look.
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Having gotten that out of the way, here’s some fox poop. At the end of last summer, these poops started showing up all over. For example, this was on our next door neighbor’s front steps. You can see the toe of my Croc for a sense of scale.
There were trees with red berries that they were apparently feasting on, and you can see the half-digested fruit inside. I kind of wonder if they had a laxative effect.
Here’s another I saw. The hair suggests this fox had eaten some animal about the same time as the berries.
A hawk killed a mourning dove in our backyard last year, and this is a pile of feathers it had plucked off the victim.
Speaking of birds of prey, on the ledge below the window you can see the streaks of poop from the falcons which roost in the old water tower near me.
There’s more to see below. The falcons catch a lot of birds, and you can see a lot of feathers from their victims at the base of the tower. It looks like they ate a blue jay.
On top of that, the base of the tower is littered with the bones of their victims, which I assume they drop after they’re picked clean.
Not the cheeriest images, I know, but it’s a reminder of how nature has its own ways that don’t pay attention to what people think.
I find it funny when we come across fish in the forest. It always takes our brains a couple of seconds to come to the logical conclusion “Oh, right. Bald eagles.”
Same with osprey over here.
You hear stories sometimes of people miles inland getting things like clams and oysters dropped on their cars by sea birds involved in a chase.
We used to see fish in the parking lot at my office. We have decorative retention ponds all around us, and around most other office buildings in the area, so we assumed it was from that. Still weird though. Especially since one woman had a fish almost dropped on her TWICE.
Turkey vultures are a common sight in the skies around here. Did you know they were almost the national bird instead of the bald eagle?
I see both turkey and black vultures around here, but this was one of the only times I’ve ever seen them feeding. We have no shortage of road kill, so I’m not sure what they’re waiting for. Or how they decide who gets what.
I get a hawk regularly visit me. I think it is mostly visiting my “outside pets” (rabbits, squirrels, chippies, small birds) rather than me personally, but Boggs and I get excited nonetheless. And since I feed all my outside pets, I am also indirectly feeding the hawk, I guess. It will land in the bush by my bedroom window, then hop to the window under my office, then hop to the window by my patio door. If I am stealthy I can follow the progress while it hunts some critter. I once saw the aftermath of a hawk plucking a rabbit right off the grass (I only saw it lifting off with something in its grasp, and feathers/fur flying everywhere). Boggs saw the whole thing tho, I hope he was not traumatized.