“In a year that stripped life to bare fundamentals,” a correspondent for the New York Times recently wrote, “the natural world has become our shared story.” It’s true. Tales of the animals in our lawns were a common topic — a happier one than politics and the pandemic — with photographs of wildlife circulating electronically. I don’t know if there were more feathered and furry visitors in our yard this year because there were fewer humans around, or simply that the time spent at home provided more opportunities to observe them, but as nature rejuvenated itself, healing in the absence of traffic and the accompanying pollutants, it seemed to rejuvenate in us a childlike curiosity and fascination with wildlife.

Rabbits were more abundant than we ever remember – and bolder, ignoring us entirely even when we were quite close. I recall one of Teale’s passages on the wariness of rabbits and suppose they sensed we were not threatening.  One of our columnists called them “terrorist rabbits” for their consumption of her flowers and escape from her traps, where they “ate the carrots and left thank you notes all without setting them off.” We didn’t have any difficulty with them in our gardens though — with all the clover and the dandelions we “cultivate” in our lawn, there was no need for them to venture into the dianthus or lettuces.

We were not so fortunate with the woodchuck(s) which burrowed underneath our gazebo and destroyed an entire garden in one night. Our gazebo is surrounded with wide gardens – visually an island floating in a sea of yellow and white flowers. While plumes of white astilbe and goatsbeard, stalks of ivory iris and yucca bells, saucers of buttery verbascum, trumpets of lemony lilies, mounds of golden chrysanthemums and clouds of chartreuse lady’s mantle swept across the southern portion, the garden to the north of the gazebo was a wasteland of stubbles and dirt – daisies and yarrows, coreopsis and primrose, boltonia and mulleins — scalped early in the season, never to recuperate. Next spring, we’ll chauffeur the woodchuck(s) to the forest prior to the emergence of flowers.

Our love for animals is not unconditional. We like skunks when their presence is only announced visually. Skunks are harmless, as long as one understands – they’re in charge. The surfeit of squirrels and chipmunks were fun to watch this fall, scurrying through the trees, as long as their harvest wasn’t forecasting a harsh winter. And deer. Since nature supplied plenty for them this year, they didn’t devour any of the garden’s buds. I never tire of the sight of a deer at the edge of the yard and will stare at them for as long as they stare at me, though I admit, I appreciate them more when they stay away from my flowers.

We welcomed a family of foxes all year. First the mother arrived in early spring, coming near to us in her completion of a circuit that started in the afternoon at our neighbor’s and returned in the evening. Little foxes followed later in the season. Theirs is a gruff bark, coarser than canines’, and they engaged with us some nights through the window in a “conversation”.  We watched the courtship of turkeys in spring, the males waltzing toward the females with tiny, minuet steps, chests forward and flaunting their full regalia, undeterred despite repeated rejection, their feathers splayed in magnificent arrays. In the summer, we observed rippling trails following the mothers, the flocks of fluffy little poults too small to be seen above the blades of grass.

Although we observed a bob cat early one morning, and we heard lots of coyotes in the valley nights, and we noticed plenty of suspicious footprints in our yard, we’ve yet to see one of the bears that have startled some of our neighbors, and we sometimes wonder how we would respond to their proximity. Some of our friends who have closely encountered bears report only a sense of awe – overwhelmed by the rich fur, the dark eyes, the chestnut muzzles, their beauty. Fear was not a factor.

Herons were more plentiful in swamps this year, their nests visible aloft the barren trees that rise from marshes like smoke stacks, long, slender trunks stripped of their branches, and hawks, perched on the forest’s pines, visible because of their size. The most impressive bird we saw was an eagle – alighting briefly in our lawn on a flight from Goodwin Forest to the Little River. But all birds impress us. We never turn from cardinals, orioles, blue birds, woodpeckers, chickadees. We scattered seed for them all winter, celebrated the return of spring’s robins, followed the journey of the hummingbirds all summer, the trumpet of the geese in the fall. The birds charted the seasons for us this year, along with the chorus of peep frogs that ushered in spring, and the orchestra of insects, autumn.  And while I always faithfully follow the trails of dragon flies and fire flies and butterflies, and grow flowers accordingly, this is the first year I spent hours observing the birth of spiders, hundreds of them, stirring, crawling, venturing cautiously along the slender, almost invisible, threads, spinning their way into the world.

I’ve always wished for the unfettered hours to simply witness wildlife, and I realized, this year, that all we really require is our own permission. In a year when the clock, and the clockwork, lost meaning, it wasn’t the worst way to spend time, or to measure it.

Dayna McDermott