San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
ANIMAL APPRECIATION
Wildlife comes out to play — or are we just finally noticing its abundance?
The other morning, a bee, one of those big furry ones, sat on our back steps. It seemed stuck. Maybe sick? My son, Oren, 8, set aside his iPad (voluntarily!), crouched down and peered into the bee’s face (if bees have faces?) to see if it was still alive. It was. Oren hovered, concerned, feeding it “nectar from a flower,” he explained, and kept watch on his newly beloved queen on and off throughout the day. Late in the afternoon, he returned from a checkin and, chowing his fifth bag of Welch’s Fruit Snacks, declared the bee was dead. Oren looked sad for a second. Then left in search of his first love. (The iPad.)
Since our coronainduced quarantine, we’ve all become secondgraders, in a way. Screen obsessed and snacking constantly, yes, but also pausing apropos of nothing to appreciate our newly shrunken worlds and the living creatures in it — other than (sorry, in addition to) the ones we’re actually living with.
During this period of isolation the internet has teemed with claims of animals commandeering cities in our absence. Wild boars barreling through the center of Barcelona. A hungry puma scouring Santiago, Chile. In Ontario, one family had no idea what to do about a moose doing the dog paddle in their pool. When the humans are away, goes the theory, every other creature can play.
Last month, here in the Bay Area, the streets were quite literally overrun when 200 goats went racing through San Jose, transforming a quiet residential neighborhood into what looked like the starting line of Bay to Breakers. (If we’d still had Bay to Breakers, and if all the runners were dressed as goats.) The YouTube clip was viewed 4.5 million times.
Novel, clickable encounters, all. But runofthemill runins have been bringing local friends equal pleasure. “Early morning road fawns,” Bonnie Tsui posted from Berkeley, of two wobblylegged babes chilling on the doubleyellow line. “Duck eggs spotted on our evening walk!” Instacaptions Chronicle columnist Vanessa Hua, perched over a halfdozen nesting in reeds in the East Bay Hills. John Birdsall tweets from his backyard: “Not as sexy as coyotes prowling San Francisco, but in 15 years here in Oakland I have never seen so many bees.” (Ditto to the gorgeous swarm of dragonflies circling above my deck as I type, creating a buzz so loud I initially mistook it for a drone.)
No one has it better, though, than the naturalists working in Yosemite right now. Cory Goehrig was up at Tunnel View the other day, one of the most popular scenic vistas in the park. “For the first time in my 13 years here, I could hear the waterfalls,” he says. “The birdsong was almost deafening. I see a bear almost every day, foraging for food naturally.” Without the trash and food and fallout from 4 million tourists. “It’s a wild place again now. I’m seeing Yosemite as John Muir did.”
The rest of us are just happy to see a gray fox trotting through downtown San Rafael. A couple of coyotes frolicking along the dog run in Corona Heights in San Francisco. A greathorned owl treesitting in Golden Gate Park. A gray whale breaching in Tomales Bay.
Lila Travis of Yggdrasil Urban Wildlife Rescue in San Francisco has gotten lots of calls lately about wildlife loitering in unlikely places. Last month, a frantic caller reported a lone peacock squatting on a front porch not far from the San Francisco Zoo. (“It’s a mystery,” Travis says. “The zoo said all their peacocks were accounted for.”) A true first in Travis’ 20year career: a river otter relaxing in a backyard in Point Richmond. Photographs proved it. “Sometimes people call up all excited, saying, ‘There’s a bald eagle in my tree! And it’s a pigeon.’ ”
Travis says she has received four times the number of coyote calls since the shelterinplace order — and 500 calls and texts in April alone, up from 150 in a typical month. “Not to take the magic away or anything,” she says, but that could be because she answers her phone 14 hours a day while several other wildlife rescue centers around the Bay Area have been closed. Since March, Travis’ volunteer foster program has also been closed — or relocated: She and her 12yearold son have been caring for 27 baby squirrels, 32 opossums and one baby skunk crowded into her Potrero Hill backyard. That’s quite a quarantine crew.
Jonathan Young, wildlife ecologist for the Presidio Trust, says sure, yes, the city’s quietude and lack of traffic during quarantine have likely changed animals’ dynamics, but that there aren’t necessarily any more coyotes out there — just more sightings. Hanging at home, walking the same blocks over and over, people are noticing more. Also: It’s spring, which brings an annual babyanimal boom.
It hasn’t all been harmonious, of course. A wild turkey named Gerald was recently terrorizing innocent people in Oakland’s Rose Garden. And mama blackbirds protecting their young are divebombing locals on the corner of Avila and Cervantes streets in the Marina. Also: The reduction in cars on the road may have led to half the number of human injuries and fatalities, but it has not led to a reduction in roadkill, according to an April report out of UC Davis.
Nextdoor, always a good anecdotal gauge, has been a favorite haunt for sharing animal sightingsslashcomplaints since it launched in 2011. Posts about coyotes scoping out Walgreens or raccoons rummaging trash cans are nothing new. Still, these last two months the forum seems to be littered with petty news from the home front. “Crowvid!” a guy named Ken Miller cacawed from the Inner Sunset. “Have you been noticing a LOT of crows in the neighborhood?” Four were apparently trying to pry open his trash bin a few weeks ago. “They sort of stare at me with ‘Crowtitude,’ ” he recounts.
Citing that example, I asked Pam Young, executive director of the Golden Gate Audubon, if crows — like rats, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently warned — might be getting more aggressive in their search for food given restaurant closures. “It’s funny, isn’t it?” she says. Maybe the crows are indeed behaving differently. Or maybe, “with more time than before,” we humans are the ones who have changed. After all, when we’re not commuting two hours to Menlo Park or crisscrossing town for kids’ soccer carpool or cramming into a soontostall Muni, we’ve got much more time to walk and gawk.
A whopping 30 percent more people in the Bay Area posted observations on the app iNaturalist, this April than last April, according to its codirector Scott Loarie, a scientist at the California Academy of Sciences. That’s a significant increase, especially with popular places like Point Reyes and Muir Woods being closed. Nothing outlandish, just everyday appreciations: redtailed hawks in Pacific Heights and hummingbirds in downtown Oakland; slender salamanders in Redwood City and great blue herons in Alameda. Garden snails and ground squirrels, lots of slugs and ladybugs.
Still, arguably the No. 1 creature capturing our otherwise crisisconsumed attention is: dog. Deb Campbell at San Francisco Animal Care & Control says her agency’s typical call load hasn’t increased — but applications for pet adoptions have. “It’s been supercharged! Supply can’t meet the demand,” she says. Competition for the especially cute has been stiff: 100 applications apiece.
It makes sense. Puppies, babies, proposals. In times of uncertainty, we all want somebody, preferably soft and squishy, to love. To have and to hold — or to just hold our gaze, offline, IRL, and affirm our humanity in this fragile, frightening world. Clearly, our newly attuned hypervigilance about other humans (Are they six feet away? Are they coughing? Are they emitting droplets? Are they racist?) has seeped into an acute awareness of everything, from doorknobs to deer.
The other day, 100 of my neighbors on Nextdoor were hotly debating the validity of a mountain lion sighting on Twin Peaks. (Or was it a lost golden retriever?) The photo was blurry and of its backside and a few humans were freaking out, but not all. “Somehow wild animals don’t seem scary right now,” posted one wise man, “people without face masks I worry more about.”