Neck Deep in Good Stuff With None of the Bad

I do not normally dig in my very urban/suburban county of Arlington, Virginia, although I did dig once, some years back, past 8 feet in the snow, at night, solo, to a dog that I thought was dead as it did not make a sound.

Nope. The dog was fine -- she had simply killed a very large possum underground and could not exit past the dead body blocking the pipe.

That was a dig I will never forget!

If I did dig in Arlington, County however, I apparently would not have too much to fear from skunks. As the County magazine notes (What? We have a County magazine? I had no idea!): 

Arlington County decided to survey its parks and streams to find out what, exactly, lives here.

The answer, it turns out, is quite a lot. In three years of searching, Zell and his fellow biologists found 7,600 different species of native plants. They also spotted nearly 200 species of birds, including three types of owls; seven species of turtles; and six species of salamanders. The biologists counted 28 kinds of dragonflies, including the fetchingly named Slaty Skimmer and Unicorn Clubtail. Bats, beavers, muskrats and an abundance of Kirtland’s short-tailed shrew were all checked off on the list. The rarest animals were documented only as roadkill, including a river otter found on Route 66 near the East Falls Church Metro Station and a bobcat that met its demise on Chain Bridge Road in McLean. The hours of searching did not yield a single skunk.

... Like foxes, raccoons are classified as “locally overabundant” in the 2008 “Wildlife of Arlington” report prepared by the county.

Now that most humans have switched from foraging in the woods to shopping at the supermarket... deer populations have exploded, unchecked. Today, “we’ve sort of created almost the perfect storm, from a habitat perspective, for deer,” [Arlington County natural resources specialist] Greg Zell says.

That’s why (George Washington Parkway biologist) Erik Oberg recruits volunteers every November to help with a local deer-density survey. His line: “If you’ve never ridden in the back of a pickup truck shooting deer with laser beams, you don’t know what fun is!”

The volunteers gather at dusk in Great Falls Park, bundled up for their open-air ride among the leafless trees, and shine spotlights on every deer the truck passes. Then they count the animals and, in a version of deer laser tag, use a range finder to determine the animals’ distance. In recent years, the number of deer in the park has fluctuated from 85 to 116 per square mile—far above the 15 to 20 per square mile that’s considered healthy for the forest.

 So, we are neck deep in urban wildlife, as my own backyard camera traps suggest. 

That's not a problem!
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