Daily Star
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It always amazes me how animals adapt to ever-changing situations.
I was going up West Street in Oneonta the other day to play tennis on the college's courts and saw a nice buck eating without concern right next to the street.
If that same deer was on my hill, he would have bounded off to safety in the thick underbrush before I could get within 300 yards of him. But in the city, deer have learned they are safe around people.
Every summer after the song birds have hatched their eggs and the new chicks have taken flight, I bush hog the meadows of our old farm. I like to cut the weeds and other unwanted plants before they go to seed. It seems that if you let it go, the goldenrod overtakes the grasses and there is little feed left for any of the animals that live nearby.
Anyway, within five minutes of my mowing, the barn swallows are diving and darting all around the tractor as the numerous insects are disturbed from the weeds. Butterflies and other flying insects are easily caught by the many swarming birds. I wonder as I go round and round the fields where they have learned this behavior.
Even the crows were having a feeding frenzy. As you may know, crows are very cautious birds, yet they'll come within 20 or 30 feet of a noisy tractor to feed on grasshoppers that are exposed in a newly mowed field.
I've always been fascinated with crows. I had one for an entire summer when I was young. I found his nest in a grove of pines and in a few weeks, he would ride on my shoulder almost every place I went. One day I was up in the meadow and he flew off with some others of his own kind. It was fun while it lasted.
Have you ever watched crows as you drive down the highway? They know that by walking just across the white line onto the shoulder of the road they are safe. They don't seem to care that traffic is flying by at 65 mph or faster. Their timing is impeccable.
Last week, a red-tailed hawk perched in the trees along the edge of a field. As my mower chewed its way through the thick weeds, it swooped and caught a baby rabbit that had scampered out of the dense grasses in front of the tractor. It was probably the same hawk that fed on mice and other rodents in the upper meadow last summer.
It's funny: I mow and they feed. As I came around on the next loop, the hawk crouched and covered its kill with its wide-spread wings.
The most interesting thing that I have heard about is a coyote that waited at a traffic light for cars to stop.
A friend of mine who lives in Orange County approached the light at an intersection and noticed a grayish-brown coyote standing at the edge of the blacktop. He had seen coyotes in town before but was surprised to see the big, wild canine wait for the light to change before running into the street to pick up a freshly killed gray squirrel. He had a picture of the coyote and the red light to prove it.
I guess learning how to cope with traffic on a busy street is a perfect example of animal adaptation. As human population continues to grow and meadows and forests give way to housing developments and shopping centers, animals will have to learn to adjust. We are encroaching on their habitat at an alarming rate.
The animals that can adjust to these changes will survive. And from what I see, most of them are doing just fine.
Rick Brockway writes a weekly outdoors column for The Daily Star. E-mail him at robrockway@hotmail.com.
