Does anyone want sweet pea seeds?

[UnicornEmily]

On the one hand, that sounds encouraging from an ecosystem perspective.  On the other hand, it's a bummer for your garden and concerns about your pet's safety.  On a third hand . . . bears!  Yikes!

[Jeremy Weiss]

Well, there is no question we are going back to wild conditions. We've already got a healthy population of local Bald Eagles now, and tons of wild turkeys.  My high school band teacher claimed he saw a wolf on his drive to work one day (though since it would be odd to see only ONE wolf, I'm more leaning towards a wolf-like dog, or maybe a coywolf (coyote wolf hybrid) that looked more like it's wolf side. And there are odd reports of copperheads around as well, as there are of timber rattlesnakes. Wouldn't surprise me if, eventually, the pumas come back as well.

[UnicornEmily]

Wow.  Yeah, from an ecosystem perspective, that sounds really cool.

[Diane Whitehead]

Well, pumas are one predator we have, though we call them cougars.  When one is spotted in the city, an alert goes out to the schools to keep the children inside.

[UnicornEmily]

Wow!  Yikes.

I've lived in a literal jungle before -- one of Hong Kong's country parks -- and it's really cool to be surrounded by so much nonhuman life, both plant and animal.

It's a bit terrifying to see a two-foot-sized poisonous spider sitting in a web as tall as you are fifty feet from your house, and enormous pythons are a little unnerving, but those mostly stayed well away from the human roads and villages.  Occasionally we saw monkeys; usually they avoided us, too.  The hiking trails within walking distance of our house were awesome.  I loved hiking on them.

The biggest "wildlife" problems were the feral dogs.  They ran in packs, and some were friendly, but others were scary.  There was this one spot that was frightening to walk my dog because they'd come running after us, barking really loudly and snarling and baring teeth.  I was legitimately scared they were going to attack her and me.  Unfortunately, I needed to walk past them almost every time I took her for a walk.  I did a lot of praying for our safety.

The feral cows were funny.  They were a nuisance in that they ate everything in sight, and would stand in the middle of the road, just waiting to be hit by a car (stupid cattle!).  My mom once drove past a mother cow nursing her calf in the middle of the road.  But they were harmless, as long as you didn't walk close to the bulls (who would give you a menacing stinkeye), and pretty entertaining.  Very much

I was told that there were local farmers who would round up the feral cows once a year, butcher the excess adult animals, and sell them.  Seems like a sensible way to get nutritious meat and keep the animals from becoming so prevalent that they were a major nuisance.

Actually, maybe the biggest "wildlife" problem was the humans!  (Laugh.)  On Sundays, huge numbers of people would come to spend their day off in the country park, clogging the small roads and leaving tons of litter behind.  It made going anywhere on Sunday afternoons a very trying exercise.  Happily, the city employed people cleaning up the human mess afterwards.

Back then, I didn't try to do any food gardening.  I just managed which wild plants grew in our backyard, pulling out the invasive weeds and encouraging the plants that were pretty.  It's possible I would have found it difficult to grow food that animals didn't eat, too.  Hmm, interesting question!

[UnicornEmily]

Jeremy, I've been pondering your difficult growing conditions for the past few days.  The fact that you can't grow any food (to speak of) on your land sounds like an ecosystem out of balance, so I've been trying to figure out what the ecological solution would be.

I think the problem is that there is no predator population right now, so the herbivore population is way too plentiful.  From what you've said, it sounds like the ecosystem is trying to correct itself (with animals such as copperheads and eagles moving in), which is fantastic from an ecological perspective.  Not so great from a human perspective, however, since humans tend to not be thrilled about having predators in their neighborhood that might threaten their children.  Or pets.  Or livestock.

So I think the optimal solution for both the ecosystem and the humans would be for the local humans to switch from being a primarily herbivorous population to being a primarily predatorial population until the herbivorous populations are sufficiently low that humans can grow enough plants to eat.  One huge advantage of being an omnivorous species is that we have that adaptability, which is excellent for both our species and the ecosystem as a whole, as long as we are conscientious about using it to benefit both ourselves and the world around us.

So in other words, the best ecological solution would be for the humans in your neighborhood to start eating those chipmunks and squirrels!  (Or feeding them to your pets who would otherwise be eating non-local food.)

Trapping the animals on your own land would also come with the side benefit that the herbivores who are most comfortable raiding your garden would be less successful at reproducing than their counterparts, instead of the reverse.  By consistently eating the individual animals who eat your crops over a long-term period, you could teach the local animal populations to strongly prefer eating food sources that you don't want to eat.

In much the same way that Joseph Lofthouse teaches the insects who eat nightshades on his land to eat only the weed nightshades, so he can coexist with them peacefully and also get tomatoes.

If your community started doing this, conscientiously and with an eye towards not extirpating the herbivores, but rather using evolutionary pressure to teach them to eat food other than your crops, I think that would solve all your problems in one simple, harmonious, ecologically sustainable way.

. . . Which, of course, isn't possible if you aren't allowed to kill the wildlife.

So I'm happy that I've figured out a good solution, and sad that it's not something you'd be allowed to do.

[Jeremy Weiss]

Sure, if I could kill them, that would solve the problem by definition. With the squirrels I could even practice a little eugenics by NOT shooting the black furred ones so they became the dominant ones (which would make the squirrels stand out more to predators, which would improve their hunting success which would keep the population down.). The birds would be a little more tricky, since the only ones that come that count as game birds are the turkeys and possibly the mourning doves (who don't do any real damage anyway).

But you are correct, we can't hunt here. And even if we could I'm a TERRIBLE shot, as I learned when I took archery as my required elective sport my freshman year of college (the archery teacher still has in his office an arrow I managed to send though another arrow, sideways!)

For the deer, one possible solution would be to petition the state Game association to re-evaluate the bag limit on deer for those who DO hunt them. If they are so overpopulated, maybe they need to raise the limit, if not temporarily abolish it altogether (the same way wild hogs have no bag limit in the states where they are a problem.)

Actually, a better method would be to increase the bag limit, but ONLY for the does and young, antlerless bucks, to encourage hunters to go after THEM (who are the larger problem with their high fertility) rather than prioritizing the big bucks for trophies. (while deer are super common here, seeing an antlered buck is actually a pretty rare sight.)

The deer here have it WAY too easy (there was one around here that was able to survive with a broken, nonfunctional leg for about three years with no problem). 

Plus, fewer deer would mean fewer deer ticks, and less risk of Lyme disease every time I wanted to wear shorts outside.   

[UnicornEmily]

I like your idea for the deer.  Is that something you could petition the local government to do?

I wonder if the government might also be induced to be okay with people killing local rodents in a way that wouldn't endanger other humans or pets?  Guns being shot in backyards is an obvious no-no, and poison has serious issues, too.  Spring traps that are big enough to get chipmunks and squirrels and not cats and dogs, though?  Even if they don't kill that many animals, having a few around might work as a scare tactic that the rodents will actually care about, because it's not "all bark and no bite."

[Jeremy Weiss]

The problem, at least around here, is, again, kids and pets. A spring trap isn't big enough to kill a dog or a cat, but it IS big enough to break the paw of a curious one who sticks it in there and starts playing with it, or the hand of a toddler/young kid doing the same. ANYTHING that could potentially injure anything in a no-no.

As for the hunting thing, it's theoretically possible, but the problem is a political one. ANY proposed bill to extend hunting rights is going to get an automatic protest movement by PETA started. This also knocks out any more cutting edge solutions, like capturing and neutering/spaying deer or feeding them contraceptives, as PETA would say that was "abridging the animal's rights to reproduce as much as they want". And a plan to re-introduce the predators is going to get a big negative reaction by farmers, ranchers and homeowners. And I suspect that, if one was to ask PETA how they think the problem would best be solved, their answer would be somewhere between denying there was a problem, ordering people to grow EXTRA crops for the animals to eat to make up for the transgression of living in their territory or permanently withdrawing from any area animals are in and letting them re-claim the land as their own, until we ran out of room to pull back to and then we should do the right thing and make the human race extinct.   

[UnicornEmily]

Ahhh, I think you're right.  Yeah, it's hard to talk about setting up win-win solutions when one side of the debate refuses to believe there's any other option than a zero sum game.

[UnicornEmily]

Well, I have now changed my opinion of everlasting pea.  I hereby downgrade it to "highly invasive weed."

I thought it wasn't invasive, because even though it's a perennial, it hadn't spread very far in the twenty years since my next door neighbor planted it.  It just came back vigorously in the same places as before every year.

What I had neglected to factor in is that we've been in a severe drought for twenty years.

This year, we got more water than we've gotten in the past twenty years, and the everlasting peas are sprouting everywhere.  I'm finding sprouts all over my yard and in all my garden beds.

I live in a desert climate that rarely gets more than 18 inches of rain a year.  If this is what everlasting pea is like in a climate that regularly gets 20 or more inches of rain a year, I cannot recommend that anybody ever plant it.  This thing is invasive when there's water available.