Often at dawn and in the evenings, we walk with a border collie in Three Springs on the paved path below Wilson Gulch Drive and Three Springs Boulevard, beside the marshland and a series of small ponds surrounded by artfully arranged ochre stone slabs. It is usually quiet there, when the young boys from the apartments aren’t running riot with their skateboards and throwing rocks at cats; and if you take a moment to stop along the way, as we did the other day in the sun’s last rays, there’s a world in those ponds.
Start with the ducks, which we think are Green-winged Teals, and which arrive to claim or reclaim their preserves as winter recedes, always one pair per pond. They paddle handsomely and companionably on the surfaces, diving as the mood and hunger strike, the mousy-colored female closely following the brilliantly plumed male.
We sat still with the collie on the rocks that evening, watching a duck couple we have often seen, who do a splendid job of ignoring us. They seem to have all they need in their world, like the inside of a rough-hewn Fabergé egg, and they may also have a clutch of their own eggs hidden nearby in the grasses. It is a world utterly unstirred by human pandemics. We like to visit and watch them smoothly gliding, knowing their legs are churning beneath. We tend to assume all wildlife is itinerant, that other animals show up and disappear almost unaccountably – and there we err. Most other animals are homebodies, like us.
We were watching the ducks when one of the feral cats appeared, crouched perhaps 10 yards from us, a good-sized female with a lusterless coat who looks a little like a Persian gone to seed. We guess she’s about a year old, possibly two. We have seen her warily getting meals from some kind souls, left on porches on the back side of Pioneer Avenue. We suspect that may have something to do with the way she avidly stalks the ducks but can never get one or do more than make them uneasy.
From the cat’s vantage, Charlie the collie had interrupted her obsessive and fruitless pastime. Charlie sat and looked at her, his tail fanned out in greeting. She just stared. We meowed at her and she looked us dead in the eyes and meowed back soundlessly, moving her mouth in acknowledgment, so she wouldn’t tip off the ducks, who of course see everything. (They also have ears, which for some reason surprises people, and their hearing is human-grade.)
Then the red-winged blackbird arrived. That’s when it went off the rails. He perched on the stalks of last year’s cattails, as he does, traveling maybe 100 yards back and forth in a day, and proceeded to broadcast all of the goings-on to his silent mate: “OK, OK! The ducks, and that cat is here, and the black-and-white dog is looking at Cat and sitting, and there’s a person” – and on he went, like Howard Cosell with a smaller vocabulary and all his own feathers, clearly excited as the assorted animals were assembled in one place. And then, just as our back was turned, Cat made her move, pouncing in the general direction of the ducks but never even getting her feet wet.
That was enough for the ducks. They winged up on a sharp diagonal, rasping not their alarm but their exasperation at the little feline with big intentions.
We suspect they were telling her to go find the human food in a bowl, but it’s always hard to say. Ten minutes later, she was gone and the ducks were back right where they started, at home en famille for the evening.
