The beasts, they are a-changin’

My grandfather told me about shooting prairie chickens off the tops of oat shocks when he was a boy. By 2021, the prairie chicken count had fallen to 251 males.

In the 1950s our family would drive two hours on a Sunday afternoon just to see Canadian geese. Today I need only arrive at a golf course, city park or grassy boulevard to see Canadian geese. They are so common (and pesky) that my brother calls them flying carp. Many Canadian geese have shrugged their shoulders and concluded, “Migrate? There’s plenty chow right here in the cities and nearby fields.” An Alberta wildlife biologists says that 25,000 Canadian geese spend the winter in Calgary – hardly a tropical clime. Meanwhile, Calgarian people migrate to Cancun, Acapulco or Arizona.

Cranes on the prairies

Aldo Leopold, the father of the ecological movement, once wrote a paean to sandhill cranes, a symbol of wilderness: “On motionless wing they emerge from the lifting mists, sweep a final arc of sky, and settle in clangorous descending spirals to their feeding grounds. A new day has begun on the crane marsh.” By the 1900s the species was threatened with extinction.

Now sandhill cranes breed and fatten up on small marshes throughout Wisconsin. It is common to see these stilt-walkers in alfalfa fields hunting amphibians, grasshoppers, mice and voles. The northern-breeding cranes that migrate through our prairies have become a major pest, especially to farmers who swath their grain to speed up ripening. Those long crane toes shake the seed lose. Cranes spend more time at the banquet hall of our prairies every year as they pursue a more vegetarian diet. Farmers often welcome hunters who shoot the huge birds, the “ribeye-of-the-sky.”

Turkey disasters

As a youngster any thoughts of wild turkeys came from stories about Squanto feeding the Pilgrim Fathers. Hunting the birds was something done in the South. Wild turkeys have now been introduced or re-introduced to nearly all parts of temperate North America. They are thriving beyond belief. I saw a small flock on the grounds of Hamilton District Christian High School not too long ago. In parts of southern British Columbia, they roost in tall deciduous trees right in town and do “a number” on the paint jobs of vehicles parked underneath.

Some of the wealthier Christian Reformed Church leaders living in East Grand Rapids, Michigan, have told me of the disaster wild turkeys make by scratching and roosting in shrubs and gardens in their “decently-and-in-good-order” ornamental landscaped yards.

More than likely, a lot of this is well-known to you, maybe even more if you live in rural, suburban and urban areas than if you live in the wilderness parts of North America. Drastic declines or even extinction of some species is announced daily in our news sources. At the same time booming populations of other species give joy to hunters and grief to others.

And what shall I say more? For the time would fail me to tell of white-tailed deer, of raccoons, opossums, skunks, foxes, black bears and starlings: who through faithful fecundity stopped traffic, blocked chimneys, escaped the ploys of control officers, waxed valiant in their fight for survival, and turned to utter despair the lives of alien humans who sometimes sing “This Is My Father’s World” with mixed emotions.