Of Bird and Deer and Broken Fruit

Setting aside the legitimate argument over whether pigs are actually pigs, deer are definitely not pigs.  I am speaking about eating habits, of course, not genetics. 

Deer tend to go about their eating in the same way they live life—ever cautious and never standing still for long   Deer normally pick at things a little and then move on.  This time of year, I receive daily visits from the local mule deer.  They rather drift through my yard, nosing and nipping at a tuft of this and a branch of that before fading off into the landscape again.

This winter, I also have a bird living almost fulltime in my yard.  I think the bird is a Townsend’s solitaire.  Every morning, the solitaire flutters from tree to ground and ground to roof and roof to ground again, eating seeds and unknown bits, resting and eating again.  In the evenings, when I go out back to soak in the hot tub, the bird flaps up to the rain gutter on the roof of the house nearby and sits there watching steam rise into the air all around me.

Maybe we are buddies in some kind of solitaire way.

I have taken to leaving things out on the ground for the bird: blueberries, blackberries, almond slivers or any other sort of morsel a bird might eat.  About a week ago, I split into various sections a fresh pomegranate and thumbed the seeds into a bowl for myself.  I purposely left a few seeds in the peel and pulp.  After eating my share of seeds, I took the broken fruit outside and placed the chunks of fruit on the snow-covered ground so the bird could work at the remaining kernels.

For several mornings the solitaire spiraled down from the winter sky and gleaned neon red seeds from the fruit.  After a few days, I noticed that one of the mule deer also began to visit the fruit.  A smallish doe, the deer would approach the fruit, nose at a single piece, gobble the piece down and then drift off to the next point of interest.

For several more days this continued—bird and deer sharing a pomegranate.  Just yesterday, the bird picked free the final red seed and a little later the doe drifted through and selected the final chunk of broken fruit from the snow.

--Mitchell Hegman