The Most Selfish Species

As I’ve mentioned a time or ninety, I’ve been known to frequent a certain wildlife refuge. It is also a Mike Refuge. It is an oasis for me. A rare place where I breathe deep without intention or thought until my respiration slows and I can literally feel my heart rate drop. I am not particularly prone to feeling settled; yet, I feel instantly settled there.

Getting outside is environmental Xanax for me. It is nature therapy.

In theory, this little stretch of the year when spring bursts into full bloom should be a particularly wonderful time there. Migratory songbirds are returning; flowers are erupting from the black soil of meadows scorched by controlled burns; and in countless dens and nests, babies are being born to parents who are then out and about working to feed their young. Fox, deer, birds big and small, all now have young to look after.

All around, it’s just the circle of life with all its triumphs and tragedies. Survival and reproduction. Full litters and then a slow winnowing until only a few survive. It’s just life. Beautiful and brutal all at the same time.

The ‘occasionals’ – the people who come to see something they read about in some post on Facebook - aren’t really there for the full ride though. They aren’t there for the nature that also taketh; they are only there for the ‘giveth’… and they themselves are only there to taketh.

To me, their irritating return is as predictable and regular as the arrival of spring itself. Like clockwork, each and every April, they show back up to wreak havoc and then don’t disappear again until their own stupidity has fucked up a good thing for everybody. I can set my watch to it.

The actual animal residents, however, have neither watches to set nor the pessimistic cynicism of a 52-year old, grizzled, bird-loving writer. Were they to possess either, they’d know that human assholery, sadly, faces no hope of extinction.

Animals, though, they forget.

They grow accustomed to the quiet of a place visited by few for months on end. They settle into it being, for at least those few months, a true refuge again. They have run of the place.

The year-rounders who visit in all four seasons tend to like that shift. We like the absence of other people; and we like the palpable way that absence seems to soften the animals in a way. Suddenly free to go about their business with less disruption by humans, they become less guarded and wary. There is an almost trust in it; and it is earned. We all-season regulars cultivate it by being respectful and unobtrusive and unstartling. We move slow; keep our distance; and telegraph that we pose no threat.

As a result, almost all of my closest encounters with wildlife at that refuge have come over the winter or in early spring. In that little magic window, the animals seem almost used to the kinds of people who still come when the air is so cold and bracing that even the soil crunches under your feet.

“Oh, it’s just him. He isn’t anything to worry about…” they seem to think to themselves; and then they go back to the toil of fighting for survival in a time of scarcity.

I saw that fox on a cold winter day when there were just the two of us and nothing but open fields all around us. I pulled into a dirt parking lot and there it was. It looked at me and I at it; and then it just went back to hunting. I cracked my window only enough to stick my camera lens out and capture a few frames.

I have a fox den in my own yard. The adults would never let me sit there and watch them without scurrying off. Such is the difference in acclimation when we humans are plentiful and obtrusive vs. when we are the rarer of the species’.

Which brings me back to my little refuge and the annual clusterfuckery that occurs when the place goes from being the latter to the former.

Red foxes mate over the winter; give birth to a litter of kits in early spring; and then ween them into summer. In my particular area, sometime around the first full week of April, kits emerge from dens for the first time in all of their adorable, fuzzy cuteness. They’re playful and funny and cute. I sat and watched a litter play together for hours one day last year. They played tag. They played hide and seek. It was damn adorable.

Most fox kits in my area are the furry golden brown of a golden retriever puppy. The color varies but they’re generally a light yellowy-brown. My little refuge had seven active fox dens last year. The kits born in all but one were that color.

The kits in the last den – the outlier – were freaking beautiful. There were five of them; and they ranged in color from a deep honey brown to a rich chocolate. My lord, these were beautiful little foxes. I heard about them within a day of their first appearance. I saw them the next morning. Arrived quietly; took some pictures from a distance; left quietly. Saw them the next day and the day after as well. I’d pull in at sunrise and they’d just go about their business as the sun came up unbothered by me.

Within days though, word began to spread of their existence. And then asshats began to flock to the place like moths to a flame. The worst of them were the photographers angling for pictures. Rather than maintain a distance, they’d walk to within 20 yards of the den and just stand there.

Exasperated, the refuge staff put up a yellow police tape to establish a perimeter. A photographer tore it down. Even more exasperated, the staff put the tape back up and then set up cones to keep people from parking illegally right next to the den. People ignored them; parked their anyway; and then crossed under the tape when they thought no one was looking.

Eventually, the mother fox up and took all of her kits off into the woods to some other den; and, yet, for the two weeks after, rando asshats would still show up; park illegally; and then press right up against the police tape expecting to get a perfect picture.

Selfish jerkoffs managed to undo an entire winter of coexistence in the space of a few weeks. The place is a wildlife refuge. These stupid shitheads didn’t care. They arrive to taketh. They leave only when their own selfishness has taketh away from everyone.

Only one month earlier, before the kits had even emerged from the den, that same mother fox – who was then still acclimated to people being both rare and respectful - had let me take this picture in full daylight without even a hint of wariness.

I have foxes literally 50 yards from my back door which I see all the damn time; they would never let me take that picture.

I have a bunch of pictures of those five chocolate kits in their first week out of the den. I would have liked to have watched them grow up and shed that first fuzzy fur. Still, like most of the regulars, I was relieved when the mother relocated them. They were being downright harassed.

On Sunday, I got word that the same mother had given birth to another litter and was raising them in the same den where last year’s were first weaned.

I popped by two days ago; the police tape was already up. Popped by yesterday; there were already cones and ‘no parking’ signs – and photographers lined up. Popped by today; and the refuge staff had already had so many problems with idiots acting like idiots, they were erecting a barrier blocking off the entire area from view.

A six-foot high barrier necessitated by the stupidity of selfish asshats who could have just been respectful; kept their distance; and watched from a distance still well within the reach of their zoom lenses.

I didn’t see this year’s kits.

I’m fine with that.

It isn’t a zoo. It’s a refuge. For them. Not me.

Maybe I’ll see them this winter.