Coyotes, Birds and Outrage

On Thursday morning the sky was blue like a big eye and I was in the Bronx, looking for coyotes with David, the head of wildlife for the Bronx. The Bronx is the borough above the island of Manhattan and it stretches to the east and north. People in New York love saying “Only in the New York!” whenever anything out of the ordinary happens, even if they haven’t been anywhere else or aren’t really paying attention. The Bronx has the same effect, with its housing projects, ripgut poverty and big roads. People say, “That’ll be the Bronx…” So I’m trying to find coyotes there (and when I mention it I wait for the little shake and shrug, “Only in…”).

Coyotes are like foxes – good looking wild dogs that eat anything. They crossed from the west to the east during the twentieth century, breeding frighteningly with wolves to become the top predator in the north east. People occasionally run them over in the Bronx or just see them, so I went up to see David and he said we should go looking in Van Cortlandt park, which is a huge rugged park which stretches all the way up to Westchester, which is like Essex or something. I was hoping he would say come along at 4am and we could go properly looking with trail mix and warm socks but he said 9am would be fine, give him a bit of time to get settled.

Even then I was hoping for some grasslands and maybe a coop to hide in and wait for the coyotes but instead we went to Van Cortlandt park public golf course, where David thought we might find some people who had seen them. The golf course was nice and after hearing some tall stories in the golfshop (which had that good smell of new shoes and gloves and rubber), we set out in a golf buggy under the blue sky with the trees turning and the geese messing about in the lake. David was fifty or so, with a notepad in the pocket of his brown flannel shirt. He had a droopy grey moustache that flopped down around the side of his lips and he was awkward and shambly – uh, my gripe with the golf course is, uh, to that, uh, this used to be some pretty good forest – until he saw an animal of some kind, any animal, when he took on a sort of old surfer radness – whooah, nice pipetail monarch… nice butterfly, excuse me!… am I seeing right? Red tailed hawks… wow!

The drive around the golf course was fine and I was taking notes with my cold fingers. The highlight, though, was Linda, who sold refreshments by the eighth tee. Linda had green eyes and a nice face and she wore a puffy jacket with her hands in the pockets. She didn’t get much conversation out by the eighth with her hotdog stand and cooler boxes. She had a good turn with the boys that came round asking for Bud and hotdogs at ten in the morning but when there were no customers she took the opportunity to treat me and David (who was having a hotdog and Sprite) to a wild stream of nature monologue, leaping from animal to animal to bird to animal, free association Linda talking as she threw bread to the birds and a couple of jumpy rats that went leaping about across the concrete path. It went a bit like this:

“I love animals I don’t understand people that don’t sometimes there are guys and they throw their rocks at the rats I mean rats I don’t like them much but don’t throw your golf balls at them; the birds they come down here and early in the summer I would just take out some bread and throw it in the bushes and soon there would be a hundred birds, the ones with the spots, the sparrows and man, I don’t know they’ve gone now but I used to get these birds I called them the cheesebirds because I used to feed them cheese, American cheese that’s what they liked they loved that cheese those cheesebirds they’d come and jump right up on the barbecue and try and take the cheese off the burgers! I don’t know where the cheesebirds have gone but I don’t mind I’ll feed anything there’s this squirrel who comes every day and he gets up on his hindlegs and makes this eeeh eeeh and I know he wants some food I give him peanuts those squirrels are smart he comes right up I like them more than the rats but I’ll feed the rats this year they came right up here too and the other day I was throwing some bread and I couldn’t understand why no birds were coming I could hear them in the trees and then I saw there was a cat just in the bushes. They are a few cats around and one came around for a few days and I thought I’ll take that home the next time she comes along. Then she didn’t come. I don’t know how I would have fit her in I’ve already got two cats but I just love animals don’t you? The other time I found a hawk it was lying out there on the grass oh this must have been a month ago and I saw it and I thought it was dead I thought oh no it’s dead but then I went over and it moved and it wasn’t dead but it had hurt its foot so I fed it some raw beefburger! That was the right thing to do right? I made a path a trail of raw beefburger to try and get it to come off the grass because they were hitting balls down here and they were going to hit it! They would have killed that bird. I like big birds I like all birds, I really like, oh, I really like humming birds. My sister she lives in Nevada and I was visiting one time and she said, oh, look and I was whooah! There was a humming bird at her feeder and I went and got my camcorder I didn’t care! My sister was just watching but I was screaming and I went to get my camcorder I had to film that. Funny thing is, my sister lives down the road from a llama farm. Now THOSE are beautiful animals we went to see them, they’re breeding them I wonder what they’re breeding them for….”

And then at about 3am on Saturday morning, after a couple of parties – one of which high up in a wonder apartment overlooking central park full of priests and ballet dancers and gossip columnists – I fell asleep on the subway and some crafty or other cut his (or her) way into my jeans and stole my wallet!

Outrage!