Strange Gifts

Photo copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved.

It's been a day of strange gifts.

Weather out of season, visitors out of place.

For a couple of weeks now, we've been getting monsoonal thunderheads daily, mostly with no more than a couple of dozen sprinkles. Until now. It rained all night last night, something that almost never happens even in the wettest season here. Today, it was intermittent clouds and fog and sun and thunder and rain and hail and sleet and even a snowflake or ten. 

August's monsoons seem to have decided to make an entrance three months early again this year, wedding themselves to late-Spring snows.

That photo? An hour or so ago, maybe a little less.

The Chokecherry Birds were back today, much of the clan joyously flinging oiled black sunflower seeds in the feeder. The Say's Phoebe showed up again, too, this time to cadge nectar out of the hummingbird feeder with his long bill.

And we had a pair of very-early-morning visitors who perhaps explain Raven's agitation last night, running great distances to and fro, barking and howling, for more than hour despite the impending storm. Normally, at the first drop in barometric pressure or distant rumble of thunder (so distant it's out of human hearing), he's scratching at the door, begging to be let in. Thanks to idiots shooting indiscriminately up on the ridge, he now associates the sound of thunder with that of gunfire, and having had the real thing aimed at him as a puppy before his rescue by us, it terrifies him. He won't go out in it, not for love or money Milk-Bones.  

And yet, last night, for more than an hour, as the storm hurtled closer by the second, he ran, in the wind and eventually the rain, back and forth and back and forth, patrolling, barking and growling and howling, impervious to my repeated entreaties and demands that he come inside.

This morning, we were visited by what we believe were two young adult gray wolves. The photos are too blurry to tell; they run fast and low to the ground, powerful sloping hindquarters and big shaggy heads, and when in full predatory sprint, they're nearly a blur. One was buff-colored, the other a black-and-silver mix that is known in the breed as grizzled. ["Gray wolf" is the species designation; their actual color varies along a spectrum of off-whites, grays, tans, browns, and blacks.] I know what you're thinking, but we know the neighborhood dogs, and these were not that. They also did not, to my eye, appear to be hybrids.

This is unprecedented here, at least in contemporary terms. The Mexican gray wolf is indigenous to this area, of course, and there are clans of them in the mountains, but overdevelopment and human encroachment have forced them continually further back, limiting their "safe" range even as climate change decreases their options for survival in those spaces. Still, we've never seen one here, at least in daylight; they may very well visit at night while we're asleep, but allowing themselves to be seen is a first. To the best of my memory, I've never before seen a wolf in the wild, save along a New England highway once twenty years ago. 

We're not sure what to make of it. On the one hand, it worries us that weather and creatures alike are showing up here out of season; it's yet another indicator of the rapacity of advancing climate change. At the same time, it feels like a gift — that they all seem to feel secure enough to come here, to this place.

Here, they are welcome, and they will be protected.

It feels like grace.

All content, including photos and text, are copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.