A Lifetime Nature Walk: Always a Babe in the Woods

By Andrew DeQuasie

This book is a collection of essays and anecdotes about 19 animals, 18 birds, 15 fish, 10 reptiles, 31 insects, 39 plants, 17 trees, and 6 other subjects encountered in nature by the author, mostly in the region from West Virginia to Vermont. Hopefully, it lends personality to these subjects and leaves the reader with a sense of the changing view of our natural world during the 20th century. It is not encyclopedic, being

limited to things the author has had experience with. On the other hand, it contains many off-beat details not to be found in other references.

Among stone-age peoples, one of the important duties the hunter had to fulfill when he returned home was to tell the other members of his tribe where he had been, what he had seen, and what he had done. That is what the author attempts to do in this book.

For instance, he tells of : Dealings with raccoons, both tame and wild. How to rescue a skunk from a storm drain. Home-made animal traps. What constitutes a successful backwoods fox hunt. How kingfishers and sparrow hawks mourn their dead. Why bluebirds are scarce. Why a killdeer will tease a dog. Where to find bluegills in the Ohio River or smelt in the Niagara River. A box turtle's prediction of dry weather and rain. Living where copperheads live. Playing with garter snakes. How to find a bee tree. The very different lives and habits of hornets, brown wasps, and mud dauber wasps. Sleeping with bedbugs. The psychological warfare of the deer fly. When to look for snow fleas. How to recognize chamomile by its aroma. The scarcity of ginseng. Trouble with jack-in-the-pulpit. Using jimson weed to kill flys. The forms and effects of poison ivy. Why black raspberries grow in smaller patches than red raspberries. Making use of elderberries. How Indians used acorns as food. Growing black walnut trees from seed.

There are no pictures in this book. Those would greatly increase the size and &nbs

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 20, 2000
• ISBN: 9781462814039

Andrew DeQuasie

Andrew Dequasie's day job has been chemical engineering. His previously published works include: THIRSTY - a humorous western novel. THE GREEN FLAME - an autobiographical non-fiction account of a rocket fuel project. THE SPRUCE VALLEY MIRACLE - an earth-bound science fiction novel. THE CROSSROADS TIME - a coming-of-age western novel. A LIFETIME NATURE WALK - a non-fiction book of nature essays

Book preview

A LIFETIME

NATURE

WALK

ALWAYS A BABE

IN THE WOODS

Andrew Dequasie

Copyright © 2000 by Andrew Dequasie.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of nonfiction. All information given in this book is believed by the author to be true and accurate.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-7-XLIBRIS

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Animals

Bat

Bear

Cat

Chipmunk

Cow

Deer

Dog

Fox

Groundhog

Horse

Mouse

Muskrat

Pig

Porcupine

Possum (Opposum)

Rabbit

Raccoon

Skunk

Squirrel

Birds In General

Bluebird

Chickadee

Chicken

Crow (Raven)

Dove

Eagle

Hawk

Hummingbird

Killdeer

Kingfisher

Pheasant

Redbird (Cardinal)

Robin

Screech Owl

Swallow

Turkey

Turkey Vulture (Buzzard)

Whippoorwill

Fish & Such

Bass

Bluegill

Catfish

Fresh Water Clam

Crayfish

Darters

Glass Fish

Leech

Perch

Pickerel

Red Stripe Minnow

Salmon And Trout

Shiners

Smelt

Sturgeon

Reptiles And Amphibians In General

Black Snake

Box Turtle

Copperhead Snake

Frogs And Toads

Garter Snake

Green Snake

Lizards, Salamanders, And Newts

Rattlesnake

Snapping Turtle

Water Snakes

Insects In General

Ant

Ant Lion

Bean Beetle

Bedbug

Black Fly

Bumblebee

Chigger

Cicada

Deer Fly

Dragonfly

Earwig

Flea

Honeybee

Hornet

Housefly

Japanese Beetle

Ladybug (Ladybird)

Midge

Mosquito

Mud Dauber Wasp

Paper Wasp (Brown Wasp)

Pill Bug

Praying Mantis

Roach

Snow Flea (Springtail)

Spider

Stick Bug

Stink Bug

Tent Caterpillars

Tick

Yellow Jackets

Miscellany

Arrowheads

Fungi

Geology

Humans

Odd Creatures

Water

Plants In General

Anise

Arrowhead (Wapato)

Blackberry

Bloodroot

Burdock (Cardoon)

Carrot

Chamomile

Chicory

Columbine

Corn

Dewberry

Ginger

Ginseng

Groundnut

Indian Cucumber

Jack—In—The—Pulpit (Indian Turnip)

Jimsonweed (Flyweed)

Lady’s Slipper (Moccasin Flower)

Marijuana

Mayapple

Milkweed

Mushroom

Stinging Nettle

Pansy, Petunia, Four O’clock, & Zinnia

Pansy

Petunia

Four O’clock

Zinnia

Parsnip

Peppergrass, Shepherd’s Purse, & Wood Sorrel

Poison Ivy

Pokeweed

Raspberry & Thimbleberry

Rose

Soapflower

Strawberry

Teaberry (Checkerberry, Wintergreen)

Trillium (Wake Robin)

Violet

Water Weed (Jewel Weed, Touch-Me-Not)

Weeds Of The Garden

White Snakeroot

Zucchini And Other Squashes

Trees And Bushes In General

Apple

Birch Tree

Elderberry

Evergreen Trees

Fig

Grapes

Hazelnut

Hickory

Lilac, Flowering Quince, And Mock Orange

Lilac

Flowering Quince

Mock Orange

Maple

Mulberry

Oak

Osage Orange

Peach

Sassafras

Sycamore

Walnut

Bibliography

This book is dedicated to the hope that our species has the

humility and wisdom to value and appreciate all the members

of our own species as well as those other species found in

nature.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It is often said that our achievements result in large part from standing on the shoulders of those who have gone before. It is certainly true of this book. My father started me on this nature walk by passing on his love of the outdoors and much of what he knew about it. Beyond that, many other books have told me what it was that I saw and others have prompted me to go in search of things I had not seen. The books in my home library that I’ve found useful are listed in the bibliography, and sometimes referred to by number in the text.

INTRODUCTION

My nature walk didn’t start with any intention of ‘doing’ a nature walk. Far from it; I just did what came naturally. It’s natural for any kid to have a great curiosity about all things in his or her world. My world started in a small town, and soon moved to the country. Although I went to college in Pittsburgh and lived a few years each in Baltimore and Niagara Falls, those were necessary settings, not entirely places of choice.

Being a ‘country kid’ does leave its mark on a person. There’s a lot of truth in the old saying, You can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy. One aspect of this condition is that I am able to be alone without feeling lonely. I much prefer a small circle of friends to any crowd I’ve ever been in. The country setting, whether it be fields, woods, streams, or lakes, is the setting I feel ‘at home’ with. Quite likely, the person born and raised in a major city feels ‘at home’ with that setting, but I sometimes wonder about that. Most of our problems in modern times involve other people. I can walk out into the woods and feel the people-pressures melt into insignificance or at least fall into perspective as not being too terribly important in the over-all scheme of things. Shakespeare said it well in As You Like It; And this our life, free from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything. I would not change it.

In any event, I have spent considerable time in the country setting and will try in this book to present a great deal of nature trivia. The emphasis will be on things I’ve had personal experience with and information you’re not likely to find in other books. This is not an encyclopedic reference, but the table of contents is organized to help you find any specific information that might interest you.

It’s only fair to mention that I don’t claim to be an ‘environmentalist.’ Actually, I’ve spent much of my working life (as a chemical engineer) being part of the problems the environmentalists complain of.

I know that many of our environmental problems are due to expanding human populations everywhere. Having raised two sons and two daughters and having no regrets about it, I can’t claim any right to wear an environmental halo on that subject.

Worse, I can’t entirely accept the premise that all species must be preserved at any cost. Personally, I would be willing to eradicate poison ivy and mosquitoes, or at least confine them to some tiny off-shore island, if that were in my power.

Consider also the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. A majestic work of nature; yes? Well, suppose it had been created by a mining company? An ugly relic of man’s greed; no?

Mother Nature has destroyed and modified species wholesale in the past, and, like it or not, our species is likely to prove disastrous to a great many other species. The passenger pigeon and the dodo bird were early members of that sad club. Are we willing to limit the numbers of our species to save other species? My mathematical training convinces me that finite resources cannot support an infinite population and that, in turn, may lead to hard choices that few of us will like, environmentalist or not.

My father used natural resources as he pleased or as he had to. He hunted and trapped and dug roots for sale with no notion that the supply might be limited. That’s the base I started from, but my view has evolved, not from any greater personal wisdom, but simply by observing what has been happening. For instance, in my teens in the 1940s, I did believe that the world would someday run out of oil, but I would have considered it ridiculous to think that we could fish ocean species down to dangerously low levels. The oceans, after all, were limitless; they were OCEANS, for God’s sake !

So, while I admit that the environmentalists have proven me wrong many times over, and have done me a service in the process, I would be or become a hypocrite if I tried to wrap myself in that mantle. Eventually, the real environmentalists would kick me out of the club anyway.

‘Nature Lover’ is a label I can wear comfortably, remembering that it’s often said that, We always hurt the one we love. And I promise to report truthfully in this book what I have seen and what I believe to be true.

ANIMALS

Within the last fifty years there has been a major shift in the public view of the animal kingdom. In my father’s time, animals were simply there to be used. He hunted and trapped as he thought necessary and proper. We ate our fill of rabbit, squirrel, and deer and were happy to have it. People wore fur coats and were proud of them. Many people decorated their cars with fox tails or squirrel tails and carried a rabbit’s foot for good luck.

The hunters and trappers were seldom deliberately cruel, beyond the needs of such trades. But they didn’t much concern themselves with the rights and feelings of the animals. Neither does the lion or tiger concern itself with the feelings of its prey. That is the nature of being a predator.

Then came Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit, Milne’s Winnie The Pooh, Walt Kelley’s Pogo, and an avalanche of Walt Disney characters, leading inevitably to Bambi. And our population shifted from the farms to the cities, living more and more with the fictional animals and less and less with the real creatures.

Not so very long ago, nearly every family had at least one deer rifle and one shotgun. They were prized tools, much as many other farm tools were. My brother and I could be found alone or together in the woods with a loaded .22 rifle from the age of thirteen onward.

Now, it’s been at least 40 years since I’ve carried a gun in the woods. I’ve traded it for a camera. But I see that as a personal choice, not a moral issue. The hunter does serve a purpose.

The extinction of the passenger pigeon and the near extinction of the bison and several magnificent whales have made it clear that our destructive power is excessive and must be regulated. Likewise, dwindling seafood catches in several areas have made it clear that conservation is essential to ourselves as well as to the threatened species. Often, it is necessary to take drastic action to curtail ‘time-honored’ harvesting activities, even when this creates a real hardship for those who have been making a living at the particular harvest involved. In the long run, the unregulated harvester would sooner or later destroy his own living anyway.

Yet, all this seems no reason to quarrel with the hunter or trapper who is endangering no species. Very few of the animals being hunted or trapped would have lived to old age in their entire history. I doubt that a rabbit or racoon prefers being killed by a fox, coyote, or dog, to being shot by a hunter.

Many rabbits are raised as food for sale. Must their fur be wasted because the wearing of furs has become politically incorrect? And, though I can’t imagine that I’d ever want to buy or wear a mink coat, I don’t see the point of denying it to anyone else. I don’t know whether minks have a happy life on a mink farm, but it’s surely no worse than the life of a chicken on a chicken farm. Or, on a deeper philosophical level, is a mink better off to have lived on a mink farm or never to have lived at all? What is certain is that many people in the fur business have lost their livelihood for uncertain reasons.

No part of an endangered species (ivory, rhinoceros horns, leopard skins, etc.) should be legal in commerce anywhere, but we do need to be specific. The deer herds do need the hunter if they are to be spared the misery of winter starvation due to overpopulation. The beaver is making an excessive come-back in some places and relocation can prove a failed exercise as we run out of places to relocate them to.

It may seem egotistical to say that we are the lords of the earth, but that is the present state of affairs. Knowing that the dinosaurs once held that position may lend some perspective and humility, but meanwhile, the governing task is ours. There are some species that have mutually helpful (symbiotic) relationships, such as ants protecting aphids in return for the ‘honey’ the aphids exude, but we can take some pride in knowing that we are the only force in nature that has ever tried to protect other species for altruistic reasons. We aren’t such bad governors, and, given time, we may get really good at it. Despite considerable evidence to the contrary, I still believe that we are the most intelligent creature on earth.

BAT

It seems to me that a bat is a very special kind of flying mouse. All bats are night creatures, navigating via the echoes of their high-pitched vocal sonar. Most have a phenomenal appetite for insects, which they catch in mid-air. There are a great many bat varieties (including those that like fruit and the blood-drinking vampires), but I suppose I’ve mostly encountered the common brown bat, a relatively small creature more adapted to cold climates than the more exotic ones are. Literature tells me that there are about seven species of bats in the area surrounding my present home in Pownal, VT; four that hibernate here and three that fly south in the winter. But I’ll have to take the expert’s word for that; all I see are flittering shapes in the evening skies.

One of our favorite swimming holes on the Big Sewickley Creek in Pennsylvania was Stone Bridge, named for the bridge that arched the rocky shallows just above the pool. We often lingered there at sundown in the summertime and bats would soon appear overhead, zig—zagging among the mosquitoes and other insects.

In those days (around 1940) we all knew that bats were evil. Either they were blood—sucking vampires or they were eager to get tangled in your hair, forcing you to cut your hair away to get them out. None of us had had any personal experience with such things, but we had all heard of it from others, so we knew it must be true.

That made it okay, and even honorable, to throw rocks at those evil creatures. We threw a lot of rocks at them. And we practiced the diabolical strategy of throwing two rocks, one right behind the other. The idea was that the bat would dodge the first one and blunder into the path of the second one.

I don’t know that we ever killed or wounded a single bat with thrown rocks. Their dodging skill was considerably better than our aim.

Once in a while, someone would capture one in a building and it would be shown around to demonstrate its phenomenal ugliness and let one and all consider how they’d feel with that tangled in their hair.

Years later, I was sharing a third-floor apartment on St. Paul Street in Baltimore, Md., with three other guys. That summer of 1953 was scorchingly hot, and especially so in our tar—roofed top floor apartment. Weather permitting, I would sleep on a couch on the screened-in back porch. One night, I awoke to a recurring, Whir! Thump! noise and eventually realized that a bat was trapped on the porch with me. Evidently, its sonar could not warn it of the screen wire, and it kept flying into it. I wasn’t happy to be sharing the porch with a bat, and soon found a tennis racket one of my roommates had left there. Along about the second or third swing I took at the bat, I had a solid hit that ended its days.

During World War II, all sorts of strange weapons were proposed and tried. One of the strangest was the bat bomb. This bomb consisted of a container that held dozens of bats, each with a small incendiary device attached to it. The bomb would release its bats several hundred feet above one of the Japanese cities. The bats would seek refuge in the attics of the buildings and a timing fuse would ignite the incendiary device, so that dozens of buildings would catch fire at about the same time. Oddly enough, though this thing was designed to bring misery to our human enemies, the tie that held the incendiary device to the bat was said to be such that the bat could chew through it and escape. How humane! Or is it more correct to say, How human! The war is said to have ended shortly before the bomb was ready for use.

Today, bats look a lot less ugly to me and I’d much rather contribute to their success than to their failure. Mosquitoes have caused me a whole lot more discomfort than bats ever will, so I concede that, in this case, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

And it may not be appropriate to refer to the brown bat as the common brown bat. This creature, as all creatures, needs a habitat. In Dorset, VT, about an hour’s drive from where I now live, there’s a mountain cave that’s home to a colony of bats. An iron gate has been placed across the entrance to the cave to keep out humans. If the creatures are to do their thing, they need an undisturbed home, safe from those ugly two-legged creatures who really know how to get in a critter’s hair.

BEAR

I’ve lived in the black bear’s territory most of my life, but I’m not sure of ever having seen one in the wild. That’s partly because we have a healthy respect for each other.

Once, when headed into a very brushy area, in Pownal, VT, I came across a large rotted log that had been recently overturned. It looked like the work of a bear searching for grubs, so I changed course and stayed out of that area.

On another occasion, I was picking blackberries late in the day when I heard something crashing through the brush toward the berry patch. It had to be a sizeable animal and I’ve never known deer to be that noisy, so I quietly and quickly headed for home.

Walking through fairly open woods one day, I caught the scent of a sweaty animal. I became quite cautious and watchful, but saw no sign of whatever it was. I felt sure that no small animal would have an odor that strong, and it was a rather creepy feeling, sensing that something large was nearby, but not visible.

Sometimes I’ve found droppings in the woods which are large enough to have come from a large dog or a bear. When those droppings contain berry seeds or colors, I assume they are from a bear.

The one and only time I may have glimpsed a bear in the wild, I was well into the woods with a full-grown Irish Setter running ahead about fifty yards or so. Something dark went running off through the undergrowth to the right of me, and my first thought was that it was a large wild turkey. Shortly afterward, the dog came back and veered off along the course the creature had taken, but stopped short near the place where I had lost sight of it. By then, I was inclined to think it had been a black bear, not much bigger than the dog.

In all of this, you see the ‘healthy respect’ thing in practice. Neither of us wants to meet the other. In 1993, there were an estimated 750 black bears in Massachusetts, most of those in the western part of the state, south and east of me. By 1995 that estimate had changed to 1,000 or more. I assume their population density is about the same in the local areas of Vermont and New York, and growing. Bear sightings in towns are becoming almost too common to be newsworthy.

And bear in mind that I said I have never seen a bear in the wild. We have a red raspberry patch in one corner of our Pownal, VT, lot and a mature sweet cherry tree at the edge of it. On June 9, 1995 I began picking the raspberries and saw that I’d better start picking the cherries if I wanted to save some from the birds. On the morning of the next day, my wife, Clara was walking up the driveway and was thoroughly startled, to say the least, to see a full-grown black bear climbing down from the cherry tree.

In the woods, the bear has a good chance of hiding from you. But, when food scarcity or population pressure brings it into your yard, there’s a better chance that you’ll see it. After Clara saw the bear, both she and our daughter, Linda, recalled hearing odd sounds that they couldn’t spot the source of.

One of our friends on the eastern slope of our Vermont ridge had a bad time with a mamma bear and its cub raiding his chicken coop several times in 1997.

It seems as if bears will eat just about anything; bugs, berries, fruit, meat, bird seed; you name it. (I was recently startled to see black bears grazing on grass in an open-air fenced-in zoo.) Campers especially are warned that food scents will attract bears and food should not be kept in or near a tent. For a few years in the 1970s, there was a bear that made the news each fall by gorging on fermenting apples along the Mohawk Trail (Massachusetts Route 2 near Charlemont), then sleeping or staggering around drunk within sight of the road.

My brother and I were often in the Pennsylvania woods from about the age of eight onward. We had the comfortable notion that we could outrun a bear downhill. We thought that, since the bear’s front limbs are shorter than its hind limbs, the bear would tumble if it tried to run down a steep hill. Based on Cramond’s book (31), I no longer believe that. I think a black bear on the attack would be about as swift and dangerous as a 300-pound dog.

Why would a black bear attack? Well, (a) a mamma bear may consider you a threat to her cubs, (b) if you catch the bear by surprise, it may attack instinctively, (c) if humans have been feeding that ‘cute’ bear, it may have lost its fear of humans, and (d) if it’s very hungry and you look like an easy kill, the bear just may break all the rules.

If the bear is undecided or at some distance, you may bluff it away with loud noises or by making yourself look larger, such as by standing on a stump or by unfurling a blanket or umbrella in front of you. Otherwise, if you can get up a tree in a hurry, that may be your best bet. The black bear can climb trees, but you’ll be above it, kicking it in its sensitive nose while its paws are occupied with hanging onto the tree.

A word of caution about climbing trees: the next time you’re out in the woods, look for a tree you could climb in a hurry. There may not be any. Most trees in the woods don’t have limbs low enough to reach easily. (Many pine trees have low limbs, but they are usually dead and may not hold your weight.) That means you might have to shinny up a tree, which requires some athletic ability and a tree that’s about six inches in diameter. Trees that are easy to climb are usually standing alone in a pasture or front yard where access to sunlight on all sides encourages low limbs.

Bear experts often recommend that you lie down and play dead if confronted by an aggressive bear. This usually works, but can be painful, since the bear usually mauls the one playing dead. I’d rather try the pepper spray described below.

When alone in the woods now, I carry Halt, which is a cayenne pepper extract in a spray can. Sprayed in a bear’s face, it will cause a severe burning sensation which should cause the bear to leave me alone for ten or fifteen minutes, and I can still run a goodly distance in that time. However, I have no desire to put this to the test either.

I’m inclined to wish that the bearskin rug by the fireplace would become popular again and the bear-hunting population would increase. Theodore Roosevelt used to go bear hunting for sport (And was thoroughly lampooned for it by Mark Twain.). In Daniel Boone’s day, bear-hunting was an important food-gathering operation, though I suspect most of us wouldn’t like bear meat at all. It is reputed to be very greasy, as one might suspect of an animal fattened up for hibernation. The American Indians used bear fat to add gloss to their hair (22). Trapper’s tales imply that Indians used bear grease liberally as weather protection in winter.

The voters in Massachusetts recently voted to require that bear hunters keep their dogs on leashes while hunting bears. I suspect that this almost guarantees that many bears will escape the hunters. With faith in the democratic process though, I believe that the law will change in the hunter’s favor as bears become a real backyard hazard. In fact, Massachusetts did lengthen its 1999 bear hunting season in response to the increase in the number of bears coming into towns.

Still, I think that mutual respect and avoidance is the best policy for now. For my sake, for your sake, for the bear’s sake: DON’T FEED THE BEARS! My problem now is whether having a raspberry patch and a cherry tree amounts to feeding the bears.

And one last piece of information. All black bears are not black. Some black bears are brown. The bears don’t know any better. It’s the name that’s wrong.

CAT

The old saying about domestic cats is that, They never really are tame, are they? And that’s exactly right. If a cat in good health is abandoned, it will find itself a place to stay and catch enough mice to live on. Months later, it will still be a healthy cat. A dog in such circumstances usually becomes a pitiful bag of bones, desperately seeking a new home among humans. (There are exceptions, such as the female German shepherd that raised five healthy pups at the city dump in North Adams, MA, in 1995. She avoided humans and hid her pups, but was so dangerously wild that she had to be shot.)

In my teen years, I worked one summer on a 200-acre dairy farm near Volant, Pa. The barn was huge and there were four young cats living in the hay loft, totally ignored by the other people on the farm. They were obviously useful to the farm, since they must have been living almost totally on mice. Had I been wiser, I would have let them be as they were, but that seemed unnatural, so I undertook to tame them and succeeded. The result was that they lost too much of their natural caution and began dodging among the cows at milking time, eagerly lapping up any spilled milk. All fell victim to trampling by cows before the summer was over.

The mother cat has a tendency to hide her new-born kittens in some secret place. I once saw a mother cat carrying her kittens home from a country trash dump where she had made her nest in the wreckage of an overstuffed chair. It had probably been convenient for her because of the supply of rats and mice living in the dump. One by one, she took her kittens by the nape of the neck in her mouth and carried them home to the people who thought they owned her. Likewise, I once saw a cat carrying a kitten down from the heights of East Rock Park near New Haven, CT. She had probably chosen the park due to the food supply from tourist garbage and the mice attracted by it. Quite likely, the reason these cats eventually bring their kittens home is a realization that the local food supply won’t easily support the whole family beyond a certain point, and certainly not in winter time. Why hide the kittens in the first place? I once saw a gruesome possible answer to that question. Around 1940, our family cat had her litter of kittens in a cardboard box in a rear storeroom of a nearby business. The owner of the business went into that dimly-lit storeroom one day, reached a hand into the box, and got the scare of his life when the mother cat let out a blood-curdling howl and raked her claws along his arm.

Dad promptly agreed to take the cats home, and left them in a box on an open side porch. One night soon afterward, we were awakened by a horribly noisy cat fight on the side porch. By the time we had the lights on, the carnage was done. Another cat or cats had killed all of the kittens. Why? Only a cat would know. Cats do have some remarkably noisy fights among themselves, almost always at night. If you’ve ever been walking along a dark