Juggling

We love all the wildlife here, but unfortunately the wildlife doesn't love each other, and since we use meal worms to attract everything right up to our house, we end up having to do a lot of juggling to keep the worst enemies separated from each other. We're not always successful.

We especially like the carnivores, and realize we have to have prey animals on our land to feed them, and that is all right with us. The prey animals are more numerous, and generally have less charisma, than the carnivores. The trouble comes when the big carnivores want to feed on the smaller carnivores. 

Here's how it shakes out. Cooper's Hawk is a major predator and mainly feeds on the larger birds like doves and quail, and ground squirrels, all animals with enough meat on them to be worth the effort it takes to catch them. We have tons of quail and doves and squirrels, so that is as it should be.

Bobcats I believe take mostly rabbits, which is what we also have lots of. When I have found their kills, the bobcats have eaten all but ends of the legs, and a sack of entrails, just as a cat would leave after eating a mouse.

Coyotes are more opportunistic. Family parties often trot through on a broad front so one coyote can chase a rabbit or other small animal across to be intercepted by a coyote on the other side, or anyway that is what they seem to be doing. Also they eat carrion.

But here is where we begin to have problems. In our first year here, when we sat out on our back porch with our morning coffees and tossed out meal worms we quickly began to attract lizards, handsome big Desert Spiny Lizards, doing pushups and showing off their deep chests as they competed for worms, and  narrow Whiptail Lizards that ran across the porch chasing each other and reaching such speeds that their front legs lifted off the ground. These all quickly tamed enough to take the worms out of our fingers.

 

The everyday small birds came too, Cactus Wrens and Curve-billed Thrashers, seasonally White-crowned Sparrows and Yellow-rumped Warblers, our little bunch of 3-4 species of hummingbirds, all smallish and not of much interest to carnivores.

Then one day a roadrunner came, and, offered meal worms, immediately became our tamest bird, that sat in our laps as long as the worms were coming, that followed us from window to window if we didn't come outside soon enough. What do you suppose they eat when they aren't getting worms? lizards.

  So there was already a bit of tension when our lizards were out, and one, and now increasingly, two roadrunners, suddenly arrived. Usually the lizards quickly slipped into hiding. And the roadrunners had their own worries. Sometimes the roadrunners would look intently up in the sky, then freeze where they were standing, and we would get up and look the way they were looking, and there would be the Harris's Hawk sitting in the top of the pine tree, and there was instant distrust between them. 

Then there was a new thing, because the two roadrunners were male and female and the male would catch a lizard, and shake it sideways to attract the female's attention, then come after the female shaking the lizard, and the female would take off running away, but beginning to slow down. And now sometimes, as he was running after her, he would jump high in the air, and that must have been part of the show, and then they  would mate for a long time, and only when he was finished would he hand her the lizard.

 

Sometimes when he didn't have a lizard he would hand her a bit of stick, which presumably was meant to suggest the beginning of a nest. Then we could see now they were nesting on a huge growth of mistletoe over our front door, and after a while when we gave them a meal worm they didn't eat it themselves, but they would take as many in their mouth as they could without dropping them all, and carry them around to the nest, which meant they were feeding young. We read that they could have up to ten babies and we wondered how they would handle that. Would they bring them all to the porch together? The parents weren't just carrying them worms, they were also decimating the lizards to feed them. We had noticed that if we looked over the house across the street into some tall mesquites a pair of Harris's hawks were mating, perhaps thinking of building a nest. 

There was a commotion over our front door. It was the Harris's Hawk, We chased it away, but it had already cleared out the roadrunner nest of its nestlings.