Step out of your door and you will see and hear animals everywhere you go here on Orcas Island. Deer amble through your front yard. Quail peck through your neighbor’s grass. Eagles soar above (with a call more appropriate for geriatric chickadees), and crows and ravens caw and glurb to each other in the trees. If you have a cat, she’ll bring you shrews, mice, and voles. Walk along the beach and you’ll see the leavings of otters. Raise ducks and you’ll have minks slinking up in your forest for a bloody meal. Herons sit camouflaged in water-overhanging trees and kingfishers swoop swiftly and cacklingly down to the water and back up to their favorite perch. Migratory ducks converge in mixed-species flotillas of mergansers, buffleheads, and various strikingly-patterned bobbers. Young collared doves unable to fly yet sit quietly hiding in the brush. A bear just swam over from another island awhile back, but he was quickly relocated to a place he can share with his brethren.
There’s a lot of breathing room for domestic animals, too. You’ll consider raising animals here that you never pondered in the city. Most of us have friends who have chickens. Lots of kids here have ducks, goats, sheep, and cows in the 4H club at the San Juan County Fair. We even have a recent story of a pig that jumped ship (ferry) and swam to our shores. Local singer/songwriter Mandy Troxel wrote “Ode to Frieda the Pig” in honor of the thrill-seeking porcine celebrity.
It’s wonderful to live here and know not that you might see an animal, but that you will see many animals when you go out. Our little boy caught a snake almost every spring recess at school. I recently examined the minute yet ferocious-looking teeth of an injured bat I found on the road. Hummingbirds clamber for sucking time at popular feeders. And you will no doubt come upon a gargantuan banana or leopard slug your first day here as a tourist. Canada geese and their goslings waddle single-file across the road to their pond. And rabbits are everywhere – from the moment you step off the ferry.
On Saturday afternoons we don’t think, “Hmm, should we go to the mall or the arcade?” We don’t have those here. We think, “Hmm, should we go to the pond and catch newts or wade out to where the sand dollars are?”
