It’s Sunday morning several months ago. There’s blueberry pancakes on the stove, coffee perking, church to attend. I walk out onto my front lawn to get my fat Sunday paper, overflowing with summer sales and depressing news. Out of the corner of my eye, hopping sadly among the daylilies and weeds that make up the two-foot green space at the end of my block along the train embankment, I see a little head. I drop the paper and walk across the street, standing in the middle of Hawthorne, watching. A little body darts out and back into the next thicket of shrubs-it’s hopping on three paws, holding the front right foot up in the air. At first glance, I thought it was a young coyote, but I was too far away to get a good look. I ran to my neighbor’s, borrowed his phone, and called River Forest Police Department’s non-emergency number, asking if they could send out Animal Control.
Let me digress for just a moment here-I’m a lifelong Oak Park-River Forest kid. I am well-acquainted with the host of forest preserve residents we dwell alongside-it’s one of the reasons I will never move west of the Des Plaines River. And while I’m not claiming to be St. Francis of Suburbia, the injured and orphaned have a habit of finding their way to my door, or simply into my line of vision. Opossum, raccoon, chipmunk and skunk have all maneuvered their way into my fenced yard and past my unimpressed Cocker Spaniel. A nest of six baby bunnies just recently vacated their pad at the back of the yard. I have saved a cardinal with a broken wing, a baby opossum that was trapped in a neighbor’s garage, and too many stray cats and dogs to count. I have helped the local police reunite a family of ducklings (three of which had fallen down a manhole), and located a Ferret Adoption Club for a sweet, but smelly, little guy that had wandered up to our family’s lake house door (most likely a sad family pet that someone no longer wanted). But I could not have saved those animals alone. I had resources-the Internet and Trailside Museum.
The Animal Control officers who answered our call that morning were fast, kind and efficient. They did not laugh at me like my family usually does and did not even comment on my knowing the phone number of the Animal Control Department by heart. One officer handed me a flyer with information on coyotes and how they are becoming a more visible nuisance in suburban neighborhoods. They also told me that if what I saw was indeed a coyote, then they could not do anything about it-it was out of their hands. I looked at the photos on the flyer. The little animal hiding in the bushes was not the picture on the flyer; it was not a coyote. I told them I thought it was a gray fox. This changed things a little. They could snare him, get him in a cage and either take him to the Forest Preserve (where he surely would not last out the day among larger predators), or let me take him to a wildlife center for treatment.
This was the first time I have needed the services of a rehabilitation facility since Trailside stopped offering it. I made the call anyway, knowing I would get nowhere. Trailside referred me to the Willowbrook Nature Center in Glen Ellyn, which then referred me to two people in Cook County who do rehabilitative work at home. One number was disconnected, and the other was an answering machine for the Animal Care League on Wabash in Chicago.
To say this was aggravating would be putting it mildly. Where was Virginia Moe when I needed her?
My grandparents used to take us to Trailside Museum in the ’60s and ’70s when it was filled with chickens and smelled like dead fish. I took my children there in the ’80s when it started to turn the corner from scary to informative, when there was a red fox in the pen outside, barn owls in a cage and Virginia Moe running the show from a room upstairs. The ’90s saw a move toward the intellectual with classes, lectures and eco-tours. Along with the new millennium came budget cuts and a bad turn of the tide for the Hal Tyrell Trailside Museum. The personal touch disappeared-an era of taking care of politicians first, and the local flora and fauna second.
As it sadly turned out, the cage, the phone numbers and my good intentions were of no use to me or the young fox. It was not a broken leg that had rendered him incapacitated; rather, it was a bullet hole in his front hip. He had been shot-in my town, in my neighborhood, and not with a BB or pellet gun but with a real bullet. I know, I know, you’re going to tell me “these things happen all the time,” and that I am totally unaware of kids shooting guns in the forest preserves, and people being robbed in bright daylight on the street where I live. I don’t know anything about it until I read it in the paper the next week. And it’s not front-page news.
The Animal Control Officers made the very humane decision to put the injured animal out of his misery, and he was euthanized. I thanked them for their help, said I was sorry it had to turn out this way, and went back into my house to flip my burnt blueberry pancakes.
Mom always said to “pick your battles.” Don’t waste your breath, or your time, on things that cannot be changed. I’m not sure if this is an actual battle, a tiff, or merely a literal acknowledgement of yet another situation in which the voice of the people is drowned out by the whirring of calculators adding up hefty salaries in Stroger, Jr.’s office. If I can balance my sad checkbook, then they sure as hell should be able to balance theirs. The Trailside Museum’s rehabilitation and hospital services are still intact at the facility, going unused and turning obsolete. How cavalier they are with our hard-earned tax money. How sad that helping a community nurture the nature surrounding it is no longer in the Cook County Forest Preserve’s budget. I hope I am never again in the position where I have to search for someplace to help me save an injured or abandoned soul-whether that soul is animal or human. And to think I used to have that someplace at my own back door.
Twenty years ago, I made the conscious decision to raise my children in this area so they would have access to all the City of Chicago has to offer, not losing sight of the beauty of nature in the process. But being a part of nature and a member of the world’s population is a big responsibility. I’ve tried to teach them it is our job to take care of our own little part of the earth we inhabit. I hope no parent in this town ever has to turn their child’s face away from an injured animal because they did not have the resources or guidance to help it. What are we teaching the next generation by turning away?
And the bullets in my backyard? That’s another story, another soapbox.