The Bullhead Queen: A Year on Pioneer Lake

What Are Animals For?

What Are Animals For? 70 I t was one of those transition days. On a gray September morning, a slight mist hung on the air, as if a gauzy curtain had been dropped over the stage, signaling the end of Act One and hiding from view the preparations for Act Two. Pioneer takes on a mysterious aspect on days like this. It ceases to present itself as a straightforward little lake and assumes instead a cloak of inscrutability. Anything becomes possible. I was out on the lake in the canoe, taking some exercise and checking out the migrating ducks that had dropped in to Pioneer for a rest and a bite to eat. I was hoping to see something exotic. Pioneer usually only attracts the most commonplace : mallards, teal, wood ducks, lesser scaup in spring. I heard a splash behind me and turned around to see two dark forms tussling in the water. I was momentarily taken aback. Black ducks? Coot? What would cause ducks to fight in the fall? Looking again, I realized I was watching not birds but long, slender forms—mink? Otters! There were river otters on Pioneer, and they were rolling about in the shallow bay, splattering water in all directions, and generally creating a ruckus. Otters are an infrequent sight in our neck of the woods. The first I recall seeing were on the Rum River, about twenty miles west. Our family came upon them one summer afternoon as we canoed down the river. The Rum cuts through agricultural land, but its banks are shaded by box elders, and the otters had made a slide on a slope beneath the boughs. Three or four, undoubtedly a family group of cubs and their mother, were taking turns skimming down a slick, muddy run from the top of the riverbank into the water. There seemed to be no reason for doing this other than it was fun— at least, it looked fun to us. We were charmed. How often is it that people watch animals goofing off? Wild animals are sober, industrious creatures , doing everything for a purpose, wasting not a single calorie in frivolous activity. Some evolutionary biologists claim that this is the only way to explain animal behavior. Even what looks to us like play is assigned evolutionary benefit. The sliding otters, probably siblings, or parents and children, were bonding. They were exercising large muscle groups. They were rehearsing escape strategies to employ when confronted with a predator. They couldn’t have been goofing off on a nice summer day. What adaptive benefit could that wastrel activity have? Back on Pioneer Lake, the wrestling otters—which looked to me like they were having fun—became alert to my presence. They froze, heads in midair, then dove into the lake and disappeared. I kept alert for the otters the remainder of the fall, but they appeared only that once. It was as if the mist, while obscuring most objects, had revealed them to me, and when it lifted, they evaporated as well. Months later, on a cold, frosty, January day, they reappeared . Not the animals themselves but evidence that they had been in the area. This is how wild animals often reveal their presence—in past tense. Nature, like a cipher, seemingly prefers to speak in code. In the case of otters in winter , this is stunningly, weirdly like a visual Morse code, that is, little round paw prints followed by a long, tunnel-like What Are Animals For? 71 indentation in the snow. Otters traverse open ground by loping then sliding, loping and sliding. Two otters, it seemed, had traveled side by side along the eastern shore of Pioneer, right past our dock laying in winter senescence on dry land, past our neighbors, and on to the alder thicket on the north end of the lake. I could tell they had paused a moment to check out the dock; their tracks embroidered the perimeter. On the south end of the lake, the tracks trailed off toward the road. It seemed likely that the pair had crossed the road and church parking lot, moving back and forth between Pioneer and a shallow, marshy bay of South Center Lake. I wondered if that explained why I had not seen otters on Pioneer of late—they had been spending most of their time on the larger lake. Otter young are born in late winter or early...