When I was a kid there were no skunks in this valley.  A disease went through them the year I was born, and completely wiped out the population.  The first skunk I ever knew about was the one I hit with a swather on the Lillard Place when I was 16 or 17.

When I was a kid there were no foxes.  Red foxes only began moving into the area a couple of decades ago.  This spring there was a den of little foxes under Schreeck’s barn.  I told Danny about it.  He said, “That means that I know where six dens are.”

Way back before I was a boy, maybe between 1900-1910, I’m told that Orville Fisher was up in the mountains with his father when they saw an elk.  His dad said, “Take a good look, because that’s the last one you’ll ever see.”  That was before elk were protected, imported, and released.  When I was a boy there were no game feeding stations.  The feed stations were the farmers’ haystacks.  Every night in the wintertime we’d get in the jeep and go run the elk to try to make them go elsewhere.

White-tailed deer are a recent introduction.  I don’t know where they came from.  All we ever had here were mule deer.  I prefer mule deer.  They’re handsomer.  White-tails began showing up perhaps 20 years ago.  Their population is in ascendancy, while mule deer are in decline.  I think the reason is that white-tails prefer the fields, while mule deer prefer the woods.  Cougars prefer the woods, too, so mule deer are decreasing.  We have more cougars now, too, thanks to regulations that prevent hunting cougars with dogs.

There were no night crawlers here when I was a kid.  They could be purchased, but I dug my own worms whenever I wanted to go fishing.  My worms were little angleworms.  I theorize that people released their nightcrawler bait worms, and that they’ve now spread throughout the valley.  We have lots of nightcrawlers.  Margie says that she had nightcrawlers in her lawn in Baker when she was a girl, but I know for certain that there weren’t any here in the rural Haines area.

Geese always flew south for the winter when I was a kid.  We had no resident geese that stayed all winter.  There must be more open water now.  Perhaps the winters are warmer, but not significantly.  One change that I’m sure of, however, is that mountain snows come later now.  I made a mental note in my teenage years that I could count on our mountain tops to be permanently snow-covered for the winter by September 10th.  That hasn’t happened now for many years.  It’s usually October before the mountains stay white.

That’s probably good for the mountain goats.  I marvel that they can survive up on those snow-covered peaks through their six months of winter.  They’re remarkable animals.  We had no mountain goats until they were introduced by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife in the 1980s and 1990s.

The 1990s is when they introduced wild turkeys.  We have lots of wild turkeys now.

We had lots of ring-necked pheasants when I was a kid.  They went into decline about the time that skunks showed up.  I think skunks and foxes destroy the nests.  We have no pheasants now.

I don’t remember ever seeing a blue heron or an osprey.  They erect nest platforms for ospreys now to encourage their proliferation.  Last year an osprey wiped out the rainbow trout that I planted in our pond the year before.

I never saw a bald eagle or a golden eagle until perhaps the 1970s.  Aaron told me this week that about eight years ago, when he worked at Sextons, he went out early one morning, about 6:00, and saw six or seven golden eagles.  They were lined up and perched on the big fence posts along the road.  Each big post had an eagle on it with its back turned toward the rising sun.  Each eagle had its wings stretched out full length.  He thinks they were warming themselves in the sun.  The birds were huge, the wingspans impressive, and all together in that pose they made quite an amazing sight.  Each one’s wingtips reached out toward the wingtips of its neighbors.

About 10 years ago I did a double and a triple take as I drove past Brazofsky’s place.  Twenty bald eagles were sitting in the field occupying an area just a little larger than my living room.  There were a few juveniles whose heads hadn’t yet turned white, but most of the birds were mature adults.  They were facing one another in a big circle.  I fancied that they were having a planning meeting, and were making assignments to determine which part of the valley each would work that day.

I don’t think that there were nearly the swallows then that we have now.  I don’t remember swallows at all, but they must have been here.  If they’d been numerous, I’d have noticed.

Ringed turtle doves only showed up here about five years ago.  They look like mourning doves, which we’ve always had, but ringed doves have a black band around their necks.  They’ve proliferated so rapidly that you now see them everywhere.  There are a lot of them in Haines.  During the daytime you might think you’re hearing an owl, but it’s really the cooing of ringed turtle doves that you’re hearing.

There were no hobo spiders.  I was upset when they moved in 10-15 years ago.

I haven’t seen a porcupine for a lot of years now.  Maybe I’m responsible for that.  There were lots of porcupines around when I was a kid.  We were always having to pull porcupine quills from the noses of our dogs and cows, therefore, we shot every porcupine we saw.  They were hard to kill.  It always required multiple .22 shots to the head before they’d die.  About the last porcupine I remember seeing was in February, perhaps 15 years ago.  We had a lot of snow that winter, the regular January thaw, and then February turned cold, causing the snow to form a hard crust.  I saw a porcupine making his way from our big pine tree over in the draw of the North 40, through the field below the house, heading for Schreeck’s woods.  He’d obviously been stranded in that pine tree when the deep snows happened.  It wasn’t until the snow crusted that he could finally make his escape.  I let him go.

There was no white top or scotch thistles when I was a kid.  I remember seeing my first scotch thistle.  It was big and impressive and an oddity.  If I had dug it up and killed it, maybe we wouldn’t be fighting them now.  Ditto for white top.  If people had only known then what they know now, we wouldn’t have let these horrible weeds get a foothold.  Sin is like that.

I’ve made war on these two noxious weeds for the past half-dozen years.  I’ve seen about a 50% reduction in their populations each year.  I’ve had nine patches of white top that I check and treat each year, either with a shovel or with herbicides.  All of the patches were gone this year, but I discovered another healthy patch behind Katie’s shop.

Several scotch thistle patches were so thick three or four years ago that you couldn’t walk through them.  It was discouraging to even start fighting them.  With my estimated 50% per year reduction, cleaning up the remnants this year was a snap.  My patches are almost gone.  Sin treatment is like that, too.

When I was a kid I remember making a list of all my bad habits.  It was a long one.  I made the list because I wanted to get rid of my problems.  Several days later I realized that it was impossible to change anything, so I burned the list and decided I’d have to put up with myself the way I was.

I didn’t discover the key to change until I was 19 years old.  It’s called repentance, and the gospel of Jesus Christ.  Knowledge of Christ’s Atonement gives a person a reason to change his life, and the power to do it.  I waded into my weed patches with a vengeance and got rid of most of them.  Single plants still crop up occasionally, but they’re easy to get rid of now if I don’t give them a chance to proliferate.