Recently in camp, most of the drama in the animal world has centered on raising young. As most parents know, this can be a time of great play, worry, constant harassment, and sometimes loss.

This morning I watched five tiny Red Squirrels running around in a stand of trees. Usually Red Squirrels don't tolerate another squirrel within 200 yards and boisterously chase intruders completely out of their territory. These juvenile squirrels completely tolerated their littermates, often climbing within ten feet of each other and chasing each other only a short distance in play, then stopping. On one occasion, a squirrel sat on top of a limb, while his sibling tried to unseat him from the bottom. The one on top realized his brother's tail was within reach and pulled up on it, lifting his brother completely off the tree and holding him upside down for a second before the upside down squirrel grabbed the tree, pulled away, and chased his brother half way up the next tree.

The deer in camp have had fawns for nearly three months now, and at least two separate families reside in camp. One morning at 6:30 I was awakened by a line of five deer, starting with mother-fawn-mother-fawn-fawn. The two fawns in the rear suddenly bolted after each other in a playful chase, while their mother looked worriedly in my direction. Possibly one mother had twins and the other a single fawn. The doe in front was noticeably larger than the other doe, perhaps indicating she was a yearling from last year that had rejoined her mother with her own fawn.

Outside the cookshed is a Ponderosa Pine snag with several one inch diameter holes. Throughout the last month, I've watched two adult nuthatches making routine trips, in and out of one of these holes, sometimes as often as one per minute. That could mean 60 trips in a single hour.something that makes our troubles of feeding our own children seem miniscule.

About a week ago, an adult landed five feet from our porch and gathered some Snowberry stem fibers before flying back inside the hole to add to her nest. I believe their young are almost ready to leave the nest, as signaled by their tiny begging cries which have steadily increased in volume as their bodies have grown over the past three weeks. Everywhere else throughout the woods, small nuthatch "flocks" have recently appeared, as other pairs have fledged their young and now forage as family units.

As for other young, the list goes on and on. The Pacific Slope Flycatchers who nested our deck recently fledged their young, after making sneaky swoops under our deck for the past three weeks to feed young. The Mountain Chickadees that I watched peck out rotten wood from the underside of a branch (again outside our cookshed), have disappeared after a week of entering and exiting their hole. Perhaps a predator discovered their nest. The long-eared Owls also have at least one owlet, which back in late May was flying around behind his hunting parents calling with a distinctly different, slightly whinny, single "whoo..whoo.whoo."

The nest predators have also been under attack lately. Several weeks ago, I watched a group of Gray Jays move through the trees, alternately getting dive-bombed and driven out of the territories of first nuthatches, then Western Tanagers, then chickadees as they continued moving through the trees. Predators that eat baby birds are not well liked at this time of year, and either get mobbed, or in the case of our Cooper's Hawk, create bird alarms that can stretch for over 100 feet into the forest. The death of a baby bird may seem sad to us, but to the Cooper's Hawk, the lives of its own babies depend on the death of others.just as we humans depend on the death of other animals to support our own children.

Chris Smith, Summer 2007 Intern