There’s more than just birds on Sauvie Island. There are deer, and quite an assortment of other small mammals. Western Oregon is not really great snake country, but we have a few. There are probably bats. But we seldom see anything but birds. I suppose the reason is that most small furry or scaly critters either come out mostly at night, or are far too wary for two people to surprise as we go stomping through the bush. We seldom go driving after dark, but when we do I’ve spotted well over a dozen raccoons and possums, a few rabbits, and half a dozen deer. Alive.

The only way for me to estimate the furry inhabitants of the island is to tally the ones that weren’t fast enough. Understand, not all these identifications are 100% reliable, as due to the nature of the count, not all specimens were in great condition …

* The high numbers of possums and raccoons bothered me at first. Not the possums so much; it’s well known that the only thing dumber than a possum is two possums, or a kangaroo. At first you might think that a creature basically unchanged since the age of dinosaurs must be doing something right … and you’d be correct, but it ain’t brains. Consider, that in 60 million years the best means of defense this critter has evolved is to throw an epileptic fit, what we call "playing possum." That’s not playing, that is dead serious sheer terror. Apparently it works some of the time, possibly making predators worry that whatever the belly-up marsupial has might be catching. Possums freeze in the headlights, like deer and ‘roos. It has been determined that the main predator on the Virginia Opossum (Didelphis virginiana) is the American Steel-belted Radial (Firestonii goodyearibus). Possums survive by breeding like bunny rabbits. Which, of course, is the way bunny rabbits survive, too, I guess.

The raccoon is a whole different story. Nobody ever called a raccoon dumb. Not only are they smart, they are almost recklessly brave. They have a real attitude. Twice I have been sitting in my lawn chair out here at the end of the day when there is very little light left in the sky, and had a raccoon walk by and suddenly become aware of me, maybe only ten feet away. Invariably, the critter freezes, staring at me. He will watch for a while, then turn contemptuously and walk away, stopping from time to glance over his shoulder and do a sort of fuzzy Robert de Niro: "Are you looking at me? Are YOU looking at ME? Well, I’m the only one here, so you MUST be looking at me!" See what I mean? Attitude. Which works pretty good with me, I’m not ABOUT to tangle with a raccoon. But it is the wrong attitude to take with two tons of hurtling metal. Thus, the high number of smart, but dead, raccoons.

**I know, I know, I can hear your objections already. Duck-billed platypus? Sightings of platypi north of the equator are, shall we say, rare. Not to put too fine a point to it, we could say that no wild platypus has EVER been sighted outside of Australia. They are, in fact, damn hard to find even Down Under. The only one I’ve ever seen was swimming rapidly and pointlessly back and forth in a 300-gallon tank at the Sydney Zoo, quite a bit smaller than I had imagined them to be.

Well, I don’t know what to tell you. This particular splat on the road had a bill, and it had fur. You pick: 1) It was a platypus. 2) It was a weasel screwing a mallard. Which, come to think of it, is pretty much what the first white man to see a platypus is said to have shouted. And, in fact, it could explain how there is an animal like the duck-billed platypus in the first place … I keep an open mind.

***That’s right, a beaver. Leaving the park early one morning, I found it no more than twenty feet from the entrance. I stopped the car and looked it over. I’d had no idea they were so big. This one must have weighed 40 pounds. I know, because I grabbed it by its big, flat tail and dragged it to the side of the road and onto the grass so it wouldn’t get turned to jelly before Lee had a chance to see it. (Turns out she didn’t appreciate the effort, much. She has a hard time looking at things like that.) Not that it was awful; there was hardly any visible injury beyond a small cut on the tail … but then I saw the bits of sinus tissue bulging out of the nose, no doubt expelled violently when the car hit it.

I had thought beavers were only to be found in the boonies, where there were flowing streams they could dam up. No streams like that on the island. Turns out, according to the book, there are plenty of beavers who aren’t all that busy. They’re happy to live in ponds and such, where they don’t have to fell huge trees or build lodges. They tunnel into muddy banks, like nutria… and any of these critters could lick ten nutria.

Of course, there is one flowing stream in the area. We call it the Columbia River …

Driving into town I thought about it. What if the dead beaver had been a buck-toothed Ferdinand de Lesseps, surveying the land for an Oregonian equivalent of that engineering marvel, the Suez Canal. Or even better, a downstream, wooden Grand Coulee Dam. We might have barely averted a far different environment.

I could picture it, stretching from the hills of Vancouver to Scappoose, a hundred feet high and miles long. Picture the massive logs gnawed in the national forests around Mount Hood, floating down the river until they reached the wide, placid waters of Lake Portland, full of basking and cavorting beaver families on Tabor Island. See them water-skiing among the glass and granite tops of drowned downtown skyscrapers, piloting their swift, noisy personal watercraft to the headwaters of the lake, just beyond present-day Eugene…

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We also saw a porcupine, but it wasn’t dead, and it wasn’t on Sauvie Island. We were driving back home on the south side of Mount Hood when I spotted the critter, just ambling down the side of the road. There was no traffic, so I pulled over, and he ducked under the guard rail and down a small slope, where he wedged himself among some big rocks with his back and tail fully visible. We wanted him to come out so Lee could get a picture, so we chunked a few stones, careful to just hit the rocks he was hiding in, hoping to startle him enough so he’d back out and flee. But he wasn’t having any of it. I suppose X million years of evolution had taught him that turning your ass toward danger was the smart thing to do. And I can’t fault him there. It sure as hell kept US from messing with him.

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If you ever decide to travel in or live in an RV, don’t do what I did. Don’t scrape your knuckles, wear yourself out, or curse your fate. With propane tank fittings, it’s Righty loosey, lefty tighty!