By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
Salt Lake City is nestled along the Wasatch Front, on the sunset side of a 160-mile long mountain range extending north into Idaho. Because of this unique geography, the local news regularly reports close encounters between the denizens of the natural and urban worlds.
In the last two years alone, a mountain lion broke into a Salt Lake City home through a window, a young bull moose frolicked in a college campus fountain, and a black bear and her cubs foraged in Memory Grove, near the grounds of Utah’s historic State Capitol building.
Our home is in Cottonwood Heights, a Salt Lake City suburb about a ten minute drive from Wasatch-Cache national forest land in the Big and Little Cottonwood canyons. Thankfully, no lions, tigers, or bears have visited us.
We do see owls, hawks, fox squirrels, mourning doves, blue jays, huge black crows, barn rats, pheasants, and a wide variety of spiders, dragonflies, moths, and other insects. Most of these rendezvous are casual or uneventful.
Some meetings, however, remind me of one of my favorite childhood television programs—“Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.” In just 30 minutes each week, white-haired narrator/zoologist Marlin Perkins and his younger co-host and fellow zoologist Jim Fowler brought the natural world into the relative safety of my living room.
Jim Fowler seemed to do most of the heavy lifting on the show. Late night comedian Johnny Carson jokingly mimicked Perkins, something like: “While Jim wrestles with the powerful python in the swamp, I sip martinis on the deck of a nearby five-star resort.”
When it came to dealing with our backyard wildlife, usually I was like Marlin Perkins, content to watch from a distance. Still, I also had to play the Jim Fowler role during three close encounters, involving a garter snake, a pot gut, and some California quail.
One day I was out back doing some gardening. From the corner of my eye, I saw movement in the lawn and turned my head to investigate. A thin, ten-inch gray garter snake was slithering around a few feet away, right in the middle of our children’s outdoor play space.
My body went on high alert. I remembered another favorite childhood story—“Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” from the 1894 anthology The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling. Mongoose-like paternal protective adrenalin kicked in and coursed through my veins.
I charged into action. Using the tree trimmer I conveniently held, I pounced and cut the serpent in half. Almost immediately, I regretted my violent overreaction.
I do not like to kill any of God’s creatures, if I can avoid it. Garter snakes pose little risk to humans. Instead of dissecting the poor reptile, I probably could have taught my kids to avoid the little snake, or even watch it from a distance. I vowed to do better next time.
That next time arrived when my young daughter Erin ran upstairs and announced, “Daddy, something is gnawing at my bedroom window.” I was perplexed. Gnawing was not a common occurrence at our house. I initially dismissed her allegation, but she persisted.
We went downstairs to assess the situation and looked out of her window in our raised basement. Sure enough, a small pot gut was stuck there in the well, nervously gnawing at the metal framing in the mistaken belief it had found a possible escape route.
Pot guts, also known as Uinta ground squirrels, have not regularly visited our abode. And no wonder, they hibernate for almost eight months of the year. Although this pot gut posed no serious threat to me, I was a little worried about how its sharp teeth and claws might impact my pest removal efforts.
I remembered the snake incident, and decided to avoid deadly force. I found a large plastic bucket, dropped it over the pot gut, and maneuvered a thin piece of plywood underneath to keep my rodent-captive confined when I lifted the bucket. I carried the would-be intruder to a nearby vacant field and let it go.
Perhaps unduly overconfident after this successful rescue and relocation, I tried a similar catch-and-release technique when three baby quail stumbled down the steps into the landing of our basement door. I discovered them when I heard their parents crying frantically from a nearby tree.
I found a small cardboard shoebox. Careful not to leave too much of my scent on the baby quail, lest their parents reject them as a result, I eased them into the box. I set them down on the grass just below the tree from which their parents had been calling. It was another wildlife management success story.
Or so I thought. The next morning, I found three puffy piles of scattered feathers where I had left the displaced birds. The neighbor’s clever cat Minnie got to the little ones before their quail parents arrived.
It was a sad moment, but the next spring, I am pretty certain I saw the same quail couple with a whole new brood. Ahh, the circle of life.
Since the unsuccessful quail rescue, my most frequent animal visitor these days is Minnie the cat. She arrives 3 or 4 times a week and inspects the entire premises for invasive species. She used to ignore me, but now she purrs and lets me scratch her head.
Perhaps she thinks the quail were a friendship offering, but an ulterior motive for her visits is possible too. She is a shrewd cat, so a sort of feline-friends-with-benefits thing may be at work. She has watched me from a distance. She probably has figured out that my well-intentioned animal rescue efforts have a certain keystone cop quality to them, and just might inure to her benefit.
*Mike O’Brien is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. His book Monastery Mornings (found here), about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, was published by Paraclete Press (more information here) in August 2021.
