Fernmire: Who Killed Coyote 13?

August 11, 2025 ~ melaniereynolds ~ 12 Comments

Welcome back Nature-led friends to a dramatic update on the happenings around the Fernmire homestead in Northwest Washington State, US. I’ll be spilling the tea about the local political intrigue among both wild and human neighbors alike. I won’t be naming and names, because this little blog hasn’t got the bread if the crow mafia decides to lawyer up!

Humans/Hoomans/Homo Sapiens

It’s a local election year and things are heating up! There are basically two factions on the City Council, the Pro-Business and the Environmentalists and NIMBYs. The Pro-Business faction staged a political coup just before the start of the pandemic. They were playing musical chairs and one of them with the most name recognition on campaign signs about town won by hair, it would seem. About a year into his term, he started facing legal troubles for things like fraud, embezzlement, and which of his multiple residences was his REAL permanent residence. The one within city boundaries or the one on the water not in City boundaries where his wife would host dinner parties and decorate for the holidays? To avoid such a “distraction” from City business, he announced his resignation one rainy night during peak flu season and early in the pandemic to force a vote right then and there for a new Mayor when the opposing faction was missing two members and as such couldn’t challenge the motion or the council member subsequently voted as the new Mayor. The City Attorney let it stand. The little-known, first-term council member, now Mayor threw the doors wide open for development.

In the current divisive political climate both locally and beyond, I very much resent that voters are forced to choose between narratives that force a presumption that you must choose between Pro-business or Pro-environment. Instead of focusing on the issues where we could act like adults and find balance between both needs. Instead, we’re forced to deal with smear campaigns, shadow organizations financing candidates and no reliable third-party information. The longer this goes on, the less likely communities and eventually societies will be able to save themselves from existential threats. We all get to sink to our deaths while a few rich crazy people argue over who gets to be named Captain.

Wildlife/Animals/Not Humans or Plants

A Deer and A Gun

One Saturday morning we were heading down the road when a crazy, but predicable scene played out before us. A woman sitting in a white car with a bit of front-end damage, a police vehicle with two officers standing on the side of the road. One plugs his ears and turns his head, the other pulls out his service pistol and shoots an injured doe in the head. In unison we both say, “Ah, that’s a shame.” The number one killer of our wild neighbors are vehicles. It’s how the majority of deer and bears die around here.

Crow Mafia

Ther’s a larger rookery of Crows that live nearby in a eaves of some University-owned buildings. They number in the hundreds if not nearly a thousand in all. They darken the skies at dusk and dawn with black wings as they got to their daily haunts, human neighborhoods. There’s a crow couple at the end of cul de sac. I get along well with them. They are members of good standing in the crow community. They once stole a paper bagged lunch from a contractor working at a neighbor’s house. He made the mistake of setting it on the hood of his truck cab while reaching back into the cab to grab something else. That’s all it took for the crow couple to steal his lunch. The man just sighed, and I told him the nearest places he could go to grab a quick lunch.

The crow at our end of the street was a crow of low standing in his community. No mate, no assistance when harassed by the red-tailed hawk, no partner in crime for food theft. He got his meals by harassing young rabbits to flee into the street when cars were coming, thus earning himself fresh roadkill. Normally I don’t interfere with nature being nature, but this crow had the audacity to try picking up a baby bunny from right in front of my door with me standing there! The little rabbit was a bit too heavy to lift. The crow knows as well as I do, a stressed rabbits can die of fright alone if a stressful situation goes on long enough. If you’ve never heard a screaming rabbit, consider yourself lucky. It’s a terrible sound! I shooed the crow away while coaxing the baby rabbit along towards some tall brush with my bare foot.

This scenario wouldn’t even have happened if the crow was in good standing with his community. A few days later I went for a short in the morning walk and when I came back that crow was dead in the middle of my driveway. No visible wounds, not near a window, but with a broken neck, nonetheless. I moved it to the backyard and laid it in the middle of the grass to offer time for a crow funeral before dusk. I saw crow couple from down the street come and observe from high branches. I’ve always suspected he’ might have been one of their sons, but there’s no way to prove it. They never hoped down beside him, and they didn’t make death calls. Just quietly observed and then flew away. At dusk, I buried the outcast.

This summer for the first time ever, the red-tailed hawks that guard my Lapin cherry tree for me, let the crows feast and I too decided to let things be. I didn’t take a single cherry from the tree this year. I left them all for the birds this year crow and not crow alike and in return they left me all three of my blueberry bushes, which I prefer anyways.

Who Killed Coyote 13?

For the purpose of relating this story to other humans we’ll call one of last year’s most prominent coyote pups, Coyote 13, although he was one of a shared litter of eight, he’s the one that stuck around the most to this den. He wasn’t a very smart coyote so it’s tempting to affectionately refer to him as “Doofus” (meaning: not very smart) as well. Before winter last year he got into some kind terrible scuffle where half his fur was ripped of his back down to skin. It was a terrible sight to see. It broke my heart not to be able to do anything. I didn’t think he could survive the winter, but he did. Hours in the field everyday eating “field snacks” (field mice) for enough nutrition and likely sleeping in the den of his birth. He had no mate. He seemed to be doing well enough all things considered, but he wasn’t afraid of humans, just stood there like the pathetic beast that he was, but a lot of humans aren’t used to living with coyotes and are fearful of them. Make no mistake, coyotes can be dangerous, just like dogs and humans can be dangerous. (You can read my previous post with great pictures called: My Neighbor Coyote for more…)

I was worried he would get killed just for existing in plain sight, but I also worried that he might get desperate and stupid and try to snatch a small neighbor dog. There’s also a guy that frequently walks through our neighborhood that just isn’t right in the head. He doesn’t live on our street, but he seems to think he owns our street, all the other surrounding streets and well, the whole dang City because apparently, he was Mayor a long, long, time ago. He walks through peoples’ yards with his off-leash “designer” dog making everyone angry. I wouldn’t put it past Mr. Entitled to decide he’s got to do away with a weak coyote. I imagine he would call the cops to do it, and maybe it would have been a mercy killing at this point like it was for the deer. He was suffering but also determined to live. When do humans get to make that decision for a wild animal? The common practice around here is that if a wild animal can stand and feed itself without endangering humans it can stay. That last one is tricky, because someone people’s perception of a threat is a very low bar.

However, I suspect Coyote 13’s real killer was the bobcats. Our resident bobcat that has always been a powerful hunter found a mate and they had a couple of kits. It always surprises me how big bobcats actually are. I always think they should be around 20lbs ( 9 kg), but a healthy bobcat like these ones are weighing in closer to 35-40lbs (15-18kg.) One night, there was a terrible sound; A lost battle for life. I never saw coyote 13 after that night. None of the other coyotes came around anymore for months after. One of them, mom I think, used to check on him now and then. For the first time in 13 years this coyote den went unused. Sometimes on early morning walks I see a ghost of a new yearling skirting up between bushes at the far end neighborhood. Twice I’ve seen it come to the field skittishly searching to determine if it’s safe to hunt for mice here.

Wild animals have their own ways of keeping history. It’s nice to know that I’m an imbedded memory core in the family history of so many different animals. To them, my scent and shape means something in a way other humans will never see me.

Do you have any wild animal friends?

I would love to hear your stories! If its too long to comment here or you’d rather do your own post about it on your page, send me the link so I can read! Until next time, stay healthy, stay sane, and get outside!

Flower Dancers

July 17, 2025 ~ melaniereynolds ~ 3 Comments

I’m reposting this post from Patricia blog from May because I love it so much! I’ve been taking a lot of pictures around the old homestead here of Fernmire that I hope to share with you soon. Until then, please enjoy Patricia’s creative expression with nature for another post. Have a lovely day! I hope you are able to get outside and explore your own thoughts and inspiration for creative expression. Remember to do it for yourself, not for the admiration of others. I know some people who don’t think they are very creative, but mostly I observe that they are afraid to try for fear of failure. Failure is learning and part of the process. How are you supposed to learn if you’re too afraid to start at all?

Think of the people you admire most, and remember that at some point, they fail at things too. If you have empathy for them, why can’t you have empathy for yourself?

(Note: Your internet browser should have a “translate” extension if you can’t read Spanish (I can’t). Try right clicking on your mouse to see “Translate to [your language])

Dieciocho almitas danzantes

Why Our Stories Matter: The Human Narrative

June 19, 2025 ~ melaniereynolds ~ 7 Comments

Hello Nature-Led Friends!

Right now, I feel overwhelmed by a lot of things honestly. This website has been accessed and likely scrapped by AI without permission or acknowledgement like millions of other websites. Our words and pictures stolen without opt in, consent or recognition.

If a human looked at our monthly challenges and used them to become a better artist by referencing them only to become better at say “drawing moss” or “drawing a camellia” that’s fair use. I’ve never had a problem with that. AI, however, puts us all in a blender and spits out an amalgamation of our written words and images with no context and no soul. People profit off of AI-generated theft, but not the creators whose works and words and thoughts were stolen to to make the LLM (large language models) learn for the profit of Tech companies and scammers. One can hardly tell the difference between the two these days.

The artist community is in turmoil. We’ve never had our works stolen at such a vast magnitude before. While I would love to have illustrated art go with my stories, I’m not going to do it by using AI. I couldn’t expect a visual artist to respect my writing if I was using AI art and I wouldn’t respect them for using AI to do the writing for them. Artists are notorious for having to struggle to survive in Western societies to make art and it’s never been fair. Creation is often at its best when it seeks collaboration with other human artists, that’s how communities are born

Many of us are in a depressive state. Why bother? If our work it just going to get stolen why should we bother creating at all? Society seems fine with the novelty of regurgitated AI slop so far. If society sees no problem with using AI over humans, in the most fundamental act of being human why should we feed the machine?

We tell our stories through writing, performance and visuals to connect with other humans on a sacred level. It’s how we reach out with our spirit to see and be seen. We use art to better understand ourselves and the world around us. It is culture. It is the foundation of how we communicate who we are as a people. In many cultures textiles aren’t just made as clothes to be worn but to signify where you are from. You can tell who someone’s people are by the colors and the patterns used in different regions of Latin America or SE Asia, for example.

If you think societies are too big to fail, the Romans would like to have a word with you. All we have left is what we leave behind; writing, sculptures, textiles, metal works, pottery etc. Why have we lost so many Indigenous societies to time? Because they shared their history, traditions and culture through an oral tradition. When no one was left to speak the language, to tell the story, the spirit of that nations people died. The art, if not passed down, absorbs back into the landscape.

As I’ve been turning inward lately to focus on nurturing the natural world and people around me, I’ve also been reading a lot, mostly fiction and short stories. I’m a little burnt out on most Nonfiction at the moment, unless it’s told from a personal perspective.

Some Books read so far in 2025, not pictured Hillbilly Elegy, a library loan.

Fiction currently read

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

The Memory Wall (A collection of stories) By Anthony Doerr

All The Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

And my favorite so far this year:

Never Whistle at Night (An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology) Edited by Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.

As a collected work from various authors some spoke to me more than others, but several of these stories will stay with me a long time. I never thought I liked horror, but the truth is, I like horror/suspense with something to say. Stories that make us face uncomfortable truths are important to our understanding of the world around us. I’m not interested in blood and violence for the sake of graphic shock value. Some of these stories will leave you disturbed, I think, in a meaningful way.

Nonfiction Narratives currently read

Officer Clemmons, A Memoir by Dr Francois S. Clemmons

Dr. Clemmons shares his personal story on what it was like to grow up as a young, gay Black man in the 1940s. His personal account adds depth, flavor, and emotion to a time and lived experience that I will never know personally. The U.S. could really use Fred Roger’s clarity and grace right now.

Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance

I started with an open mind. I read the introduction and the first two chapters and learned all I needed to know about the author. No stories of hunting and fishing, swimming in a crik (creek), driving a tractor, cuttin’ trees, or community coming together during a great storm or tragedy. Instead, you get him making assumptions and passing judgement on people around him to justify that he’s better than they are.

What upset me the most is his account of walking down the street with his cousin and seeing a house and the eyes of suspicious children peeking from windows and a summation of their father, true or not, that he was an addict spending all his money on his drugs/alcohol and not his family. This is what Mr. Vance uses to launch into a manifesto on his opinion (peppered with statistics so you think he’s smart ‘cause that’s what they taught him to do at that fancy Ivy league school he graduated from) so he can tell you, the reader, what’s wrong with working class, rural Americans.

He didn’t talk to those kids; he didn’t talk to the dad. He built a narrative at their expense to write a book to further his reputation outside of Appalachia for money, praise and political opportunity. The worst kind of theft among people who may have little in terms of material value. He as no right to give a elegy on people he never bothered to really get to know.

Indian Legends of the Pacific Northwest by Ella E. Clark

There’s a right way to share someone else’s story. It starts with permission whenever possible. If permission isn’t possible (i.e. they’re dead and necromancy isn’t within your ability) then with acknowledgement up front that you feel that this person’s story is important and worth remembering and why it’s important to you.

We can argue whether a White person had the right to collect the stories of indigenous people back in 1953, but what if Ella E. Clark hadn’t chosen to do so out of her own interest to learn indigenous peoples’ stories? Would these stories have been lost to the indigenous youth of today or is there an indigenous historian I’m not aware of that has collected similar stories into one book? These stories were gathered from living Elders who were in their eighties and nineties at the time that they told them. Some of the stories come from even earlier origins as relayed to anthropologists and government employees either by the people themselves or by pioneers who had become familiar with their indigenous neighbors.

The introduction is respectful and gives credit where credit is due. There is extensive notetaking and what I really like the most is the brief introduction to the storyteller and something unique about them. Each storyteller of the oral tradition is also a performer. I’ve heard multiple tellings of the story “Raven Steals the Sun” and each version varies a little by who’s telling it. Storytelling is both a gift and an art form.

Alternative story forms, a side note:

I once saw a one-woman Noh play when I was in high school Creative Writing class. I was really skeptical that one person could hold my attention for two hours in such a way, but the whole class was meeting after school hours to attend the small performance and there would be dinner at a nice restaurant afterwards, so I thought it was worth giving it a try. I’m so glad I did! I’ve never seen anything like it and I think about it often. She would quick-change characters on the spot by simple props. Hair up with glasses is one character. A shawl about her shoulders and a cane is another character. Just one prop and a change in mannerisms introduced a new character and it was fascinating to watch. I was riveted by the whole thing, the quick change is part of the performance. Even after the show when we had the opportunity to talk to her and thank her for her performance I was left to wonder which version of her were we talking too. Since then, I’ve always seen people as multi-dimensional. Some have more versions of themselves than others.

The Japanese have always had an understanding of the public face/private face. The version strangers see and the version our family and friends see. This takes me to the thought of the masks made by war veterans during an experimental art therapy program that started around 2015. It encourages soldiers dealing with post-traumatic stress to paint a mask in an attempt to help them verbalize their traumatic experiences. The resulting mask is not the point, but the context of the themes that arise from it. (Links to stories about the Veterans and their masks. Military Veteran Project News – Military Veteran Project, Healing Soldiers | National Geographic, Behind the Mask – Art, Healing and Self-Discovery (A UK project story)

Wherever you are, I hope you are well! Get outside, read books, eat well, and make time for the people and things that matter to you! My fellow creators will not stop creating, we will just need to be more mindful about how we create, why we create and who we are creating it for. I’ve just started exploring growing Bonsai trees and reading How to be a Craftivist: The Art of Gentle Protest By Sarah P. Corbett.

What are you currently learning about or reading? I genuinely want to know!

In Memoriam:

My Uncle Rich passed yesterday morning. He’s free now from the excruciating pain of cancer and for that I’m grateful, but I’ll miss the timbre of his voice, abundant empathy, hearty laugh, warm bear hugs and beautiful smile.

I’ve been listening to this song a lot lately…(Arcane is an anime based off a video game.)

_{Ref A: 2A398833CE0A4E2BAF9AFDD723E49412 Ref B: STBEDGE0208 Ref C: 2021-07-28T03:10:42Z}