Wannaskan Almanac for February 1st, 2018

Bullying
bul·ly1 ˈbo͝olē/ verb:
gerund or present participle: bullying; use superior strength or influence to intimidate (someone), typically to force him or her to do what one wants. "a local man was bullied into helping them"
synonyms:    persecute, oppress, tyrannize, browbeat, harass, torment, intimidate, strong-arm, dominate.

    I think bullying is a rather natural phenomenon. In the animal world, it’s really no different. Why then are some animals naturally camouflaged for concealment? Yes, for ‘bullying of’ and ‘hiding from’ bullies who wish to eat them.

    This definition perfectly describes all the birds and animals that frequent our bird feeders, including white tail deer, black bears, and squirrels, blue jays, chickadees, grossbeaks, sharptailed grouse, pine siskins, purple finches, juncos, downy woodpeckers, and --oh, raccoons too. Nuthatches seem to just keep to themselves, although there’s no telling about what goes on behind the scenes. I suspect line budging at the bird feeder is just as irritating to a nuthatch as it is in a high school lunch line. No self-respecting Canadian goose would stand for that, as is often evident.

    Let’s take the beautiful, delicate, big-brown eyed, peace-loving whitetail deer (please!) Does, fawns, yearlings and bucks who, from the woodlands and fields, often timidly approach our bird feeding stations within view of our house, suspect of everything, wary of different things, (underscore hesitant), until two or more of them meet at the feeders, and ‘bullying’ becomes norm. Here, all this time, I thought they were worried about gray wolves and coyotes stalking their every move, when in reality it is the ‘Old Mossy Horns Gang’ or the ‘Red Does Gang’ or the YYGs (Yearling Youth Gang) that make their blood run cold.

    We’ve witnessed does (adult female deer) that stand on their hind legs and come down with their front hooves and pummel small fawns that aren’t their own, driving them away from seeds on the ground that the blue jays have flung down from the feeders. We’ve seen yearlings gang up on lone individuals that, apparently aren’t ‘their kind’. (Hard to differentiate one deer from another most days, except by size or sex) This time of year, some bucks still have their antlers, and their dominance wins out if their antlers are bigger than their opponents.

    Raccoons are no exception, walking stiff-legged around foes, and casting side-ways looks ‘that could kill'. They get a whiff of recent bear activity, and they’re gone. Bears can be bullies too, don’t think they can’t. Those Alaska videos with the bears fighting in salmon runs don’t depict their loving nature--although does depict their natural inclination of bullying others for what they want.

    Ah, the sharptail grouse: Tympanuchus phasianellus. Those round little fearthery-legged birds with snowshoes for feet, who’d rather walk or run, than fly--are bullies too, intimidating young and old for their spot on bird feeder turf. Our yard is laced and criss-crossed with sharptail tracks going every direction between feeders and trees offering cover protection, as they scurry through eight inches of snow like fat brownish penguins smooshing across arctic ice, preferring to walk than fly.

    There had been eight grouse that regularly frequented our stations about dawn, sitting precariously in the very tops of the birch trees where the warmth of the sun would reach first, then as it arose the birds would glide to the easternmost feeders and hurriedly spread out around one or two stations, three birds here, five birds there. There were always pairs of dominant couples who ‘ran the roost’ and would chase out or intimidate others. One morning, there were only seven and woe to the one less a mate. We learned there’s no sense of community among sharptails when one mate or the other has disappeared. The lone one is shunned by the coupled, like a stunning divorcée or divorcé at a Halloween party. They must eat alone. “Don’t encourage him!”

    Having been a victim of lunch money theft in junior high school and never the holder of a martial arts Blackbelt in my life thereafter, I still think the furor over bullying is a two-sided coin. On one hand you have the bullies, who act that way for one reason or another, and then you have the bullied, who either learn how their behaviors may have inspired others or they don’t, never quite understanding how they could help themselves in the long term. Even whitetail bucks learn to wait until dark to go eat.