The Least Among Us

Venus Williams had just taken the second set tiebreaker from Lindsay Davenport in the Wimbledon finals when my 4-year-old son said, "Look!" and pointed out the sliding glass door to the blood-dappled spot where a small, dust-colored animal was running in circles beneath my cat's nose. I tuned out the third set and dragged in the cat and commandeered my wife's Brighton shoe box. I put on my old green gardening gloves. The wounded thing let me pick it up.

This was on a Saturday morning, and it occurred to me that our usual veterinarian might not be at work. I called from the road.

"Are you open?"

"Yes we are."

"I have here a wounded, uh, chipmunk."

"Just a moment ..."

[A moment.]

"... Sir, we don't have a doctor here who specializes in, uh, chipmunks."

I reached into the box and stroked the back of my, uh, chipmunk.

I did not have my gloves on. The fur was soft; the little body beneath it was shivering. I stopped at another veterinary office, one I had never visited, and found it closed. A woman in scrubs appeared behind the counter and began moving folders from one place to another. I knocked. She looked up at me. I held up my shoe box. She looked back down.

I made it in 10 minutes later. A veterinarian looked at my animal. The puncture just behind its right ear was bubbling blood with each breath. "This little guy," she said, "is not gonna make it." The little guy ran in a small circle and tried to dig his way into the corner of the box. "And I think he's brain damaged," the vet added.

She took my shoe box.

"Wait," I said. "You'll do it the same as you would—"

"Humane euthanasia," she said, and disappeared through a door.

By the time I got home, Venus had eliminated Lindsay.

As a condition of living in what is popularly known as "reality," we are expected to hold these truths self-evident: that there is a hierarchy of life forms; that some animals in this hierarchy are predators and some are prey; that there are winners and losers and that all of life is built upon the necessity of loss, so that some of us might win. In this order of things, one should not be surprised that there is no doctor here who specializes in, uh, chipmunks.

People, in other words, are generally not to cry over the loss of wild rodents. But for weeks after I let go of that bloody shoe box, I couldn't stop thinking about the tiny little thing that couldn't quite dig its way out of the cardboard corner and back to the life it had known before it met my cat. The thing lived in the wash right behind my house; it was born there, it chased its brothers there, it sunned itself on my wall. It was my neighbor, after all, and I found it a bit shameful that, to be perfectly honest, I didn't even know whether it was a chipmunk.

Urban sprawl has the ironic effect of bringing man closer to nature. Californians are having a lot more encounters of the jogger-meets-mountain-lion-in-park type than they're entirely comfortable with. Here in the Las Vegas Valley, encounters with neighborhood mammals are generally less terrifying and more taken for granted, but the collision of human settlement and animal habitat is rich with real questions, both of the usual public policy sort—How does our land-use impact the animals? How do the animals impact our health?—and of the more personal kind: Who are these animals? How do they live? And why do I feel so oddly privileged to live here alongside them?

First of all, it was not a chipmunk. It turns out that chipmunks do not live on the interior of the Valley; they stick to higher elevations—Red Rock at the lowest, and more likely Mt. Charleston, where one finds Palmer's Chipmunk, a kind of chipmunk that cannot be found anywhere else in the world. What's more, chipmunks always have stripes on their faces, and my cat's prey did not. There was a stripe along its back, and it ran with its tail flipped up against its back, with the white underside facing the sky. That would make it, I learned, a white-tailed antelope ground squirrel. These squirrels are perhaps the most commonly seen of the indigenous mammals living on the margins of the Valley. And I was pleased to learn that, in the larger scheme of things, white-tailed antelope ground squirrels aren't losers at all.

The floor of the Mojave Desert can reach temperatures of 190 degrees, which is just 22 degrees below the temperature at which water boils. For this reason, virtually every rodent species in the desert roams by night and sleeps by day. As my cat found out, though, there is an exception, one animal so magnificently adapted to desert living that it can handle the sun's severity through long summer days of foraging and grooming and digging burrows and rearing young. The white-tailed antelope ground squirrel can, we are told by the noted biologist Michael Mares in his excellent book, A Desert Calling, survive more than a month without access to water. The squirrel's kidneys produce highly concentrated urine—thus preserving water—and its body temperature can rise for short periods to more than 104 degrees without any ill effects. Elsie Sellars, the education coordinator for the Nevada Department of Wildlife, says even the upturned tails are an adaptation against the heat, with the tail functioning as a parasol, its white fur reflecting the sun. Moreover, the squirrels have developed the interesting, if ill-mannered strategy of drooling on themselves to cool off. White-tailed antelope ground squirrels can eat virtually anything—from seeds and leaves to vertebrate animals (they'll scavenge when they have to)—and they can cover a lot of ground in a hurry in search of that food. (Mares writes that they forage on spaces as large as 15 acres.) We may think of ground squirrels as the least among us, but in terms of physiological adaptation, they've got us licked.

The squirrels are also vital to the desert ecosystem, says Sellars. Ground squirrels hide seeds all over the place, but, as time passes, they forget where they've hidden a good deal of their wares, and those seeds grow into plants. By moving seeds from one place to the next, says Sellars, the squirrels help ensure the survival of plant species. This, in turn, helps make the plants available as a food source for more animals. Moreover, even when squirrels don't forget about the seeds they've stored, they end up contributing to the environment because many seeds need to pass through an animal's digestive system in order to germinate. Please bear these advantages of the white-tailed antelope ground squirrel in mind when you read the following paragraphs, which include the words "bubonic plague."

A squirrel is, of course, a rodent, and, alas, we can't talk rodents without talking disease. "With bigger rodents, the potential problem is plague," says Daniel Maxson, the environmental health supervisor for the Clark County Health District. "Yersinia pestis is the organism of concern; it's the bite of an infected flea on those critters that concerns us."

The mechanics of infection are pretty straightforward:

Microbe infects flea.

Flea bites rodent.

Rodent bites you.

Of course, a flea could also jump off a rodent and bite you directly. In any case, if you are infected you'll get a fever and a swollen lesion called a "bubo" (hence bubonic plague) one joint up from the bite.

"If you see a dead rodent or a struggling rodent that appears to be ill, call us and we'll come out and test it," Maxson says. "Whatever you do, please don't touch it. If it has fleas on it, the fleas can jump on you; flees will leave a dying animal."

Now, a public-service message about the preceding public-service message: Don't panic.

"The primary problems are up around 4,000 feet," says Maxson. "In my 24 years here, we've not seen plague in the Valley, but as building goes further up the hills we're getting close. In terms of encroachment we're getting there. I'm not sure why we haven't found it lower; it could be there and we just haven't seen it. It may be a function of water availability and flea counts go up as we go up higher and see more water."

In any case, when it comes to our featured rodent, the white-tailed antelope ground squirrel, worries are fairly minimal.

"Squirrels are relatively low risk," says Maxson. "Plague is not that common."

Whew.

Other neighborhood mammals and some not-so-cute things about them:

One evening when my son was 2, he wandered from a patio at Anthem Country Club and out onto the golf course, across fairway, rough and green. I followed at a distance, curious to see how far he'd go before turning back, but he did not turn back, and suddenly there was a coyote standing about 12 feet in front of him. My son didn't seem at all frightened, but then neither did the coyote. I picked up my pace, put a hand on my boy's shoulder, executed a wordless U-turn, and began the trek back to the patio. The coyote was joined by a friend. They followed us for about 100 yards before turning away, apparently having decided there must be something better to eat.

It turns out, as Cris Tomlinson, the supervising wildlife biologist for the Nevada Department of Wildlife, told me, that coyotes rather like golf course living. "Coyotes have lost some habitat," he says, "but they're actually adapted to some level of land development. They will take people's pets. People call and say their pet's missing, and it turns out a coyote has taken it. Coyotes are probably one of more adaptable species to land development. They eat rabbits, lizards, ground squirrels and other small mammals, as well as insects and bean pods from mesquite and acacia trees."

The main health problem presented by coyotes is not that they will eat your young, but that they will bite you and give you rabies. The Health Department's Maxson says that rabies can be "wild"—with the sort of fierce, foaming-at-the-mouth symptoms you see in Old Yeller—or "dumb," where the animal appears to be docile but is really quite ill. "If you see a docile coyote and pet it and it bites you, you'll still have to undergo prophylactic treatment for rabies, just in case," says Maxson. "Stay away from coyotes and foxes—kit foxes and gray foxes—up in the hills."

Another visitor from the hillside is the cottontailed rabbit, which has adapted well to neighborhood living at the city's edges—particularly where there are substantial green belts. While gardeners may not be great friends of the rabbits, Maxson says they don't, at the moment, seem to present any major health risks. "There are illnesses rabbits can transmit, like tularemia, but none of these have been identified in Clark County at this time." (Still, the rule of thumb, as with all wildlife, is hands off—and no feeding; the animals know their diets better than you do.)

The cottontails, like the coyotes, the foxes, the squirrels and the jackrabbits around Lake Mead, are indigenous to the Valley. Roof rats are not—they were imported from California along with nonindigenous palm trees, and they thrive in lush, moist back yards. Neighborhoods like Spanish Trails, which in 2000 suffered some much-ballyhooed rat problems, create their own headaches with inappropriate landscaping. "People who set up tropical environments don't help," says Maxson. "By creating the desert-like environment that saves water, you save yourself from these roof rats."

On Mt. Charleston, another non-indigenous critter—imported not as a palm tree stowaway but most likely as a pet, according to Maxson—is the raccoon. Released into the wild, raccoons have made a home on the mountain, where they have presented a potentially serious health problem. Raccoons create latrines—that is, they keep dropping their droppings in the same place—and, because they are raccoons, they don't clean up after themselves. Baylisascaris, or raccoon roundworm, is a parasite that lays eggs in raccoon feces. Kids at play can come upon these latrines and, failing to wash their hands before eating, wind up ingesting the eggs.

"Roundworms can cause fatalities and a lot of misery," says Maxson. "Keep kids away from the latrines, and if you come upon one, call the Health District for advice on cleaning it up. Those eggs are near impossible to destroy."

The Health District has been particularly active in monitoring a disease that mice, particularly deer mice, pick up in their mother's milk—a variant of hantavirus comfortingly called Sin Nombre: the virus that has no name. Sin Nombre Virus, because it is a virus, is untreatable by antibiotics. It is present in rodent droppings and urine, and is spread to humans either through direct contact or through inhalation of aerosolized urine. When a person becomes infected, he may develop hantavirus pulmonary syndrome (HPS), in which severe flu-like symptoms develop within a week. HPS has a 50 percent mortality rate.

The good news is that, unless you live in a sealed bunker filled with mouse feces, you're reasonably safe from Sin Nombre Virus. If you're cleaning a long-unused garage or storage space—that's the time to be careful: When you sweep this stuff up, it can get into the air, and then into your lungs. Still, the disease is most commonly seen among people who are living amid the droppings for extended periods. The Health District's commonsense recommendations include storing pet food in rodent-proof containers, keeping your trash in an actual trash can with a properly fitting lid, and dragging the trash can with the tight-fitting lid to your curb on days when the trash-truck happens by.

The virus cannot be spread between humans and also will not be spread by rodent bites. Not that it's a particularly good thing to be bitten by a rodent.

The preceding information has been duly noted for you, dear reader, though it was acquired for selfish purposes: Having gently petted my sweet, doomed white-tailed antelope ground squirrel, I could not help wondering if this petting was in fact the act of a sentimental and somewhat reckless fool.

Indeed it was.

"We don't recommend touching them with your bare hands," says Elsie Sellars. "We don't want people to get frightened; it's just that these animals are potentially carriers of rabies or plague.

"In general," she goes on, "if you can catch wildlife, there's a possibility that it's sick, because ordinarily they're doing everything they can to get away."

And a wild animal, sick and in pain, is quite likely in no mood to cuddle.

"It may respond by biting you," says Maxson. "Think of it the way any wild animal would: Usually when something touches them it's because it wants to eat them."

Occasionally a homeowner will call the Wildlife Department with word that a squirrel has managed to get at the house's electrical system and begun to chew. The Department responds to these calls by bringing out a humane trap, catching the squirrel and releasing it into the desert. When I learned of this approach, complete with the words "humane" and "release," I was pleasantly surprised; I had feared less friendly solutions. But there is something winning about these creatures, and I assume I'm not alone in being won over: Even when they behave like pests, we look at them and sooner see pets. They are, of course, neither—they are desert wildlife and they are exceptionally good at living wild in the desert.

The white-tailed antelope ground squirrel is perfectly adapted to life at the midpoint of the food chain. There is, of course, the omnivorous diet ("I've seen one munching on a hot dog," says Sellars), the lightning quickness and the ability to climb cinder-block walls, but there's also great creativity and flexibility in finding shelter. If there's no dirt nearby soft enough for digging a burrow, ground squirrels can make themselves homes out of just about any rock pile, such as the one behind my house that doubles as a wash. In this way, they can create relatively impenetrable fortresses. When they sense a threat, though, they're prepared to move. A mother will find a new home and then move her pups one at a time until the whole litter has been transferred. "People will see a baby squirrel by itself and thinks it's abandoned," says Sellars. "Sometimes they'll bring them in to our office or the visitor's center at Red Rock. If you see one alone, don't take them away. Don't worry: Mom's coming back."

In the wintertime, ground squirrels go into a state of torpor. It's not true hibernation, because they'll stir themselves every so often and head out for a bite to eat, but for weeks at a time the squirrel may remain still, its heart rate reduced, its body temperature lowered, its breathing slower. The period of off-and-on torpor can last as long as six months. In the springtime, the squirrels wake with an admirable sense of priorities: First eat, then mate. If, at that time of year, you see a bunch of squirrels in a mad chase, there's a good chance that the one in front is a female. When the chase is over, the winning male goes back to his burrow to munch on seeds and the mother-to-be goes back to hers to wait about 28 days and give birth to three-to-five hairless pups. They nurse for around seven weeks, and at 10-12 weeks they begin to venture out on their own for the first time. By the time they are adults, they'll be about six inches long. My cat's victim was only about four inches long—quite clearly a member of summertime's new generation, getting its first taste of the world. And so it goes: Squirrel tastes world. World tastes squirrel.

In the spring of 1994, I was in my last semester of graduate school at the University of Washington in Seattle. One chilly, luminous morning I was riding my bike to campus from Downtown, an invigorating journey down brick streets and over railroad tracks and alongside a lake and across a bridge and onto a tree-lined campus heavily populated with both Eastern gray squirrels and students on foot, both of which present compelling reasons for slowing down on one's bike. The fellow on the bike in front of me, however, did not slow down, not even after riding over an Eastern gray squirrel. I stopped my bike and looked down and watched the blood pour from the squirrel's mouth as it breathed and breathed and then stopped breathing.

Twice I have looked down at a dying squirrel, twice I have been able to do nothing about it, and, now, when I ask the experts, "What could I have done about it?" they tell me, without much hesitation, "Nothing."

Everybody who knows anything about our neighborhood wildlife will tell us the same thing: Let the animals live lives parallel to ours. Don't touch them, don't feed them; neither harass them nor try to domesticate them. That they have survived a good many millennia of desert living and one long century of accelerated human encroachment means they're well-adapted to surviving around here, and they need neither our bread crumbs nor our terrariums. Even at our most sympathetic, we're more likely to do harm than good. If you're worried about there being too many critters around, keep your pet food inside. If you're worried about there being too few critters around, keep your pet inside. ("Loose cats can have devastating effects on populations," says Sellars. Thus my cat, an indoor cat with a backyard habit, has been grounded.) If you get a squirrel in, say, your garage, put on a long sleeve shirt and some gloves and try, without touching it, to corner it (a broom, gently utilized, can be helpful) and get it into a box with air holes. Then release your squirrel into the nearest desert lot or greenbelt, which is probably where it came from. If you're not quite sold on this process, you can call the Wildlife Department at 486-5127, where following the proper prompts will lead you to a recording. This recording will tell you to call 9-1-1 "if human safety is at risk" and that, due to budget constraints, the department is "prevented from obtaining staff to deal with non-emergency calls."

The message will also refer you to the Wildlife Department's website, which has some excellent advice, but, alas, none on how to staunch the bleeding on a ground squirrel with a head wound. In other words, if you've got an injured squirrel like mine, be aware that you may wind up feeling as helpless as I did. Veterinarians will consider these things on a case-by-case basis, and it's a reasonable bet that most cases will be turned down, if for no other reason—and health concerns would be a big one—than that it is illegal in the state of Nevada to take a wild animal out of the wild without a permit, even if your intention is simply to save its life. Nevertheless, the Wildlife Department's website recommends that you contact a licensed wildlife rehabilitator; the site's "Living With Wildlife" tip sheet (see www.ndow.org/wild/living/tips) currently lists two such rehabilitators in Las Vegas. The problem, as Frank Chaves, the Department's game-warden supervisor, told me, is that rehabilitating animals is a delicate business, "a 50-50 shot at best," in which animals suffer not only from their wounds but from stress and dehydration, and then may not make it when reintroduced to the wild. Considering the difficulty of the trade, it's no surprise that rehabilitators have preferred subspecialties—often in threatened or endangered species—and generally aren't in the business of rehabbing backyard squirrels.

"You've got to use common sense," says Chaves. "Do we want to spend more on rehabbing an animal that we've got millions of than on helping the homeless? Do we want to spend the public's money rehabbing a cottontailed rabbit when we could spend it helping a peregrine falcon or a red-tailed hawk? I don't know of any rehabber that wants to waste their time rehabbing an antelope ground squirrel. The best thing to do is leave it alone. Things die every day."

None of this is any easier for Chaves to say than it is for me to hear. "You have to understand," he says, "we're in this business because we love animals. But there's not enough money in the world, and not enough time. We can't save everything."

It is comforting, in the wake of my squirrel's demise, to entertain the not entirely original notion that these animals have a collective soul, and that when one goes down its spirit survives among the rest. In the outstanding recent documentary March of the Penguins, thousands of emperor penguins respond to a devastating Antarctic storm by dropping their petty squabbles and huddling together against the wind, absorbing one another's body heat and protecting the newborn chicks. At storm's end there are losses—and, indeed, signs of mourning—but the tribe has saved itself and its future. There are people who will find my need to assign emotional meaning to the individual animal life not only silly but chauvinistic. "We don't need to humanize nature," they'll say. "We recognize it on its own terms and it is on those terms that we seek to preserve it." This lack of sentimentality, I'll concede, is probably reasonable, but it also comes off as a sort of "ecological correctness"—a strange, self-defeating discourse in which people who claim to defend nature can't help themselves from scolding those of us who, in our lamentable lack of expertise, simply love it.

Las Vegas, it appears, still intends to let its belt out a few notches. Soon the Valley's flatlands will be wholly tamed and graded and paved over, and the hillsides will have been scooped out to make way for mansions. Even the most adaptive desert mammals can't make it in areas where indigenous plant life has been replaced by pavement and palm. On the outskirts, though, where natural habitat is still nearby, the cottontailed rabbit and the coyote and the white-tailed antelope ground squirrel will survive, because they are good at surviving. They will survive, too, in the small enclaves that, by foresight or luck, have been provided in the Valley: at the Wetlands Park and the Springs Preserve, in the protected area around Sunset Park, which burned in 2000 and is slowly recovering, and in flood channels like the one behind my house, which is built from boulders rather than concrete, creating a sort of wildlife expressway upon which species can move from area to area and sustain their populations..

But the larger story is the one of what has, in a strange sort of victory, been won in the last decade. In the wake of the Summerlin desert tortoise battles of the early 1990s, there has been an increased awareness that, if the Valley seems destined to be man's domain, and perhaps man's alone, we'd better start now to protect some habitat beyond its borders. "The desert tortoise has led to establishment of desert wildlife management areas outside the valley—at Paiute Valley and Eldorado Valley and Mormon Mesa and Coyote Springs," says Cris Tomlinson, the wildlife biologist. "That's the trade-off. Land development has its trade-offs."

I suppose I ought to embrace the trade-off. What is ecologically essential is that species must survive; that I rather enjoy having them as my neighbors is, both scientifically and politically, irrelevant. But I can't help thinking that what fueled sympathy for the desert tortoise was—go figure—precisely sympathy. There was a moment when not only environmentalists but schoolteachers and accountants and journalists became concerned about the fate of a reptile. And part of this concern rose from the very human sensibility that it is inappropriate to eject a neighbor from his home. Familiarity can breed just the opposite of contempt; we are at our most humane when we are able to project our humanity onto that which is not human. Environmentalists and biologists and naturalists cannot save nature by themselves; salvation requires the sentimentality of those of us too dumb to know better than to look into the eyes of the least among us and see, with utter delight, a little piece of ourselves.