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Our Scavenging Heritage

story by Dave McBee

It doesn't really make any difference if you shred your prey with beak, talons, or teeth, if you flail it at with a club with a sharp rock affixed to the business end, if you nail it with a stainless steel harpoon, or if you pay someone else to swing that sledge in your place, with you safely, cleanly, and innocently showing up at your local Safeway to sanitarily select choice portions, now sealed in plastic wrap, so you don't even have to get any bodily fluids on your (washable natural fiber) grocery bag. You still end up with a mouthful of meat, and blood on your canines.

Don't get me wrong. I am omnivorous, eat meat daily, and like it. But if I had to cut Bambi from the herd myself, and then club, bleed, and gut the little feller with my own hands, I'd either have to come to terms with some serious stuff, or I'd be eating a lot more beans, rice, and tofu.

It's a good experience for humans to occasionally be reminded that they don't always get to be on the top of the food chain: neutralize our opposable thumbs and our resultant abilities to make powerful weapons and build impregnable fortresses, and we're just another terrified primate shivering in the dark.

You Can't Hide Your Lion Eyes...

I was walking down the Hoh River Road in the Olympic National Park in late October, at four a.m., in a downpour, with my head lamp the only source of light. To conserve batteries I tried shutting off the head lamp and steering by the raised dotted line down the middle of the road, but that got a bit too eerie. Anyway, a swing of my head revealed a glint (no, two glints) at the side of the road about fifty feet away. Focusing the beam revealed a cougar standing just off the road, watching me. As I stood pondering my next move, the foliage erupted and a second cougar ran across the road in front of me close enough to smell.

Eventually, after much hollering/pleading on my part, the first cat got bored with me and walked off into the trees. Elk could be heard bugling off in the darkness in the direction of the river, and I presumed and rationalized that they were what the cougars were out hunting for.

But, the point is, it was pitch black and pouring rain, yet the cats were out looking for a living meal to sink their fangs into, and if they'd really wanted me, it would have been easy. I still remember standing in the complete darkness about an hour later, switching to my last set of batteries. I'm glad no one could see me.

If you glimpse a bear in the wild, you are somewhat wary because of their great size and power, but at the same time you know that they are largely vegetarians, subsisting mainly on roots, grasses, berries and such. They will take meat when they can, however, and are quite capable of killing something as large as an elk.

But if you're lucky enough to spot a cougar, especially in the middle of the night all by your lonesome you instantly realize on some basic visceral level that what you're looking at eats only meat, and, in spite of weighing a bit less than you, is still fully capable of bringing down that elk. You suddenly remember the scene in "2001: A Space Odyssey" when the leopard drops, in 70mm, from the rocky ledge onto the unwary hominid, and silently goes to work, as the other hominids meekly scuttle away, quietly.

So majestic...so lazy.

I once scrambled up a seastack along the Olympic National Park coastal strip to a ledge vacated moments before by a bald eagle and found what appeared to be fresh eagle poop. It was solid, unlike that of most birds, rustcolored, and composed mainly of the chitinous husks of sand fleas and other tiny crustaceans. I was momentarily confused until I remembered that bald eagles feed chiefly on dead and dying fish (guts, too!) and that's what you could expect to find there that would pass undigested through a bird.

The fact that the bald eagle, our national symbol, is a scavenger, albeit a large, majestic-looking one (to our eyes), though wryly amusing, is beside the point. The fact that our national symbol is routinely pestered, outmaneuvered, and out-hustled by considerably smaller, more agile, and less majestic-looking (again, to our eyes) birds is beside the point. But it is an apt political analogy, eh?

Heck, the mighty maned lion is arguably the symbol of Africa, yet it quite often appropriates the kills of smaller predators. Wild dogs and hyenas bring down their own prey much more often than do lions, but they end up with all the bad press and unsavory reputations, and the lions end up taking all the bows for the camera.

My point is that we humans tend toward praising the big, majestic-looking (that insidious bias) lazy-ass thieves, and disparaging the more pedestrian, common-appearing, harder-working members of the animal kingdom. It says a lot about us. Early man was a scavenger, too, who would take small game whenever possible, but, in the meantime, turning over a lot of rocks looking for grubs, climbing trees for eggs, and picking over carrion abandoned by more successful hunters. A friend reminds me that early humans were, more correctly phrased, "opportunistic feeders", to which I say, bah: freedom by euphemism! We were scavengers.

Our Scavenging Heritage

Walking the coast north of the Hoh River last week, I saw dozens of eagles cruising among the treetops above the beach, jockeying among themselves for position at prominent viewpoints. While this was going on, the crows were cruising close to the sand, working the beach, as it was low tide.

Spotting two crows huddled intently near the highwater mark, I spooked them into flight so I could investigate. Technically, some might say that I was in violation of national park policy by interfering with the feeding of wild animals. Technically, they might be right, and I'll take my lumps if I have to, but I prefer to think of what I was doing as expressing my scavenging heritage.

A seal pup, perhaps left on the beach by its mom so she could hunt, had been the crows' focus. Its eyes were gone, and blood poured freely from the sockets. It was truly the most grisly thing I'd ever seen. I thought about something written by Walt Whitman about it being as lucky a thing to die as to be born, and paused. The pup was about eighteen inches long, with a gorgeous lightlyspotted coat, though now somewhat bloodspattered about the head and shoulders. I kneeled to stroke its fur, and the pup twitched under my fingers. That's when I almost lost it, though the blood from the eye sockets should've been a (not) dead giveaway. I figured the kindest thing I could do was to move along quickly and let the crows finish their work before the tide returned.

Crows' babies get hungry, too.

This month our Resident Unnaturalist Dave McBee thought twice about plugging his new recipe book, "Budget Dining for the Outdoorsman."