Urban Wildlife (Besides the Feral Cats)

Arroyo with a permanent water source

 Although we live in the inner city, just a few blocks from downtown El Paso, there are several wild corridors that connect our neighborhood with the Franklin Mountains.  These mountains run like a spine through our city.  The South Franklins adjacent to us are rather barren, but the North Franklins, though still technically desert, really green up after the monsoon rains.  These wild corridors mean that a huge variety of wildlife can be found in the undeveloped portions of our neighborhood connected to these corridors.   Along with the resident foxes, coyotes, ground and grey squirrels, packrats, quail, roadrunners, turkey vultures, kestrels and hawks, the recent drought has increased the number of transitory wildlife visitors, which include mule deer, bobcats, ringtails, and (maybe) a puma or two as well (one was controversially shot by police in our neighborhood a few years ago).  There are sources of water and lots of greenery which attract them, especially a tiny stream created by runoff from a storage reservoir that is surrounded by a lush arroyo on undeveloped, city-owned land.  It’s quite wonderful to see groups of large, healthy deer casually wandering through the little strip of wild desert that divides our neighborhood from the more upscale Kern Place district.  Fortunately, this little reserve is pretty secluded and undiscovered—although it’s just blocks from our house and others houses and apartments—and the people who use it to walk their dogs (the only people I’ve ever seen up there besides water company employees and kids on their way to the nearby baseball and softball fields) seem mostly considerate and supportive of the visiting and resident wildlife, both large and small.

My wife, Libby, took this picture of a doe with two fawns on her phone

Another George MacDonald Quote

Then first I knew the delight of being lowly; of saying to myself, “I am what I am, nothing more.” “I have failed,” I said, “I have lost myself—would it had been my shadow.” I looked round: the shadow was nowhere to be seen. Ere long, I learned that it was not myself, but only my shadow, that I had lost. I learned that it is better, a thousand-fold, for a proud man to fall and be humbled, than to hold up his head in his pride and fancied innocence. I learned that he that will be a hero, will barely be a man; that he that will be nothing but a doer of his work, is sure of his manhood. In nothing was my ideal lowered, or dimmed, or grown less precious; I only saw it too plainly, to set myself for a moment beside it. Indeed, my ideal soon became my life; whereas, formerly, my life had consisted in a vain attempt to behold, if not my ideal in myself, at least myself in my ideal. Now, however, I took, at first, what perhaps was a mistaken pleasure, in despising and degrading myself. Another self seemed to arise, like a white spirit from a dead man, from the dumb and trampled self of the past. Doubtless, this self must again die and be buried, and again, from its tomb, spring a winged child; but of this my history as yet bears not the record.

     Self will come to life even in the slaying of self; but there is ever something deeper and stronger than it, which will emerge at last from the unknown abysses of the soul: will it be as a solemn gloom, burning with eyes? or a clear morning after the rain? or a smiling child, that finds itself nowhere, and everywhere?

                                                                                             —George MacDonald, Phantastes