Field Notes––

Mother Nature Isn’t Always Nice

By Dottie Evans

Remember the Chiffon margarine commercial with the catch phrase, “It’s Not Nice To Fool Mother Nature”? On TV, Mother Nature was personified as a blowsy, middle-aged woman who tended to act out violently by hurling lightning bolts when she was displeased.

We all know Mother Nature is a high maintenance lady. She can be as perverse as she is bountiful, and even in our carefully tended gardens, things go awry and then we have to live with the outcomes.

To support this observation, I want to set the record straight concerning the backyard bluebird box I described in my June 10 Field Notes column. I wrote about having put the box up in hopes of attracting bluebirds, and being happily surprised by a pair of tree swallows that swooped into the yard and took it over.

I welcomed the tree swallows because they were aggressive in driving away a pair of nonnative English sparrows that I had been actively discouraging by removing their proto-nests before eggs were laid. When the tree swallows moved in and the female began sitting on her four white eggs, I was feeling smug and happy about the whole thing.

End of column, but not the end of the story.

Later that month, I went out of town. When I returned, the tree swallows and their eggs had disappeared though the nest remained intact. Within days, those darn English sparrows returned and built their own nest on top of it. Soon, the female English sparrow was sitting pretty on her own clutch of five bluish, brown-speckled eggs.

OK, I said to myself. It’s the beginning of July already. Rather than intervene at this late date, I’ll just wait and see what happens. What happened was that two days later the English sparrow nest, too, was raided. This time, a tangled mass of nesting straw was left hanging out the entrance hole — clear evidence of a violent break-in.

Something — maybe a marauding raccoon, maybe a crow or a blue jay — was using that box for its own private food pantry. I could see there weren’t going to be any baby birds out of that box this year, but I had to take comfort in the fact that some predator was well-nourished by fresh eggs.

That is nature’s way.

Still, I felt defeated and deflated — not unlike the way I always feel when I discover a newly deer-chewed bit of garden greenery whose promising blossom has been literally nipped in the bud.

Speaking of deer, we’re all fighting this battle against the marauding horde. We know their population has exploded, there are no natural predators, and their foraging territories are shrinking before our expanding development. Deer are beautiful creatures and we absolutely hate it when they are struck and killed by cars. But we wish they’d just stay the heck out of our yards.

We’ve tried everything. We’ve hung nylon panty-hose filled with human hair among the azaleas. Tucked bars of Irish Spring soap into the rose mulch. Spat upon the lilies hoping our saliva prove repulsive. Sprayed coyotes’ urine (How do they recover it?) and scattered Milorganite pellets in the flower beds. Draped nylon netting over everything. We’ve tried not planting anything the deer like, and not planting anything period.

I have had some success spraying Bobbex, which is a foliage feeder and deer repellent produced by a company located right here in Newtown. The deer hate Bobbex and no wonder, because it really smells terrible. But if it rains you have to spray again, and there’s only so much spraying I want to do.

There are just too many deer with no place to go. The whole thing seems out of balance. Most likely, everything began to go wrong when we Europeans first got here 400 years ago and started cutting down trees — for hearth fires, for shelter, and for ships’ masts so more of us could come over.

That is man’s way.

Meddle though we must, fooling Mother Nature is simply not possible. And fooling with her is just plain fruitless because she always gets the last word.