Wild Kingdom, suburban style - Guest post by Peggy Ehrhart

Peggy Ehrhart is a former English professor with a doctorate in Medieval Literature. Her Maxx Maxwell mysteries Sweet Man Is Gone (2008) and Got No Friend Anyhow (2011), were published by Five Star/Gale/Cengage and feature a blues-singer sleuth. 

Peggy is currently writing the Knit & Nibble cozy mysteries for Kensington Books. Her amateur sleuth, Pamela Paterson, is the founder and mainstay of a knitting club in the charming suburban town of Arborville, New Jersey. Book #11 in the Knit & Nibble series, A Dark and Stormy Knit, is due out this Tuesday, August 20.

Peggy herself is an avid crafter, dating from her childhood as a member of the 4-H Club in rural Southern California. She is a longtime member of Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime and regularly attends mystery-writing conferences and participates in conference panels. She also gives talks on mystery fiction at libraries and other venues in New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey.

Here Peggy tells us about some of her "characters" based on real life, with delightful photographs as a bonus.

My long-running Knit & Nibble series is set in a charming suburban New Jersey town very like the one where I live. The suburbs are not usually thought of as teeming with wildlife, but there are plenty of interesting creatures to be seen if one keeps one’s eyes open. It’s fun to observe them, and because they are part of the suburban environment, I’ve incorporated some of them into my books. All the photos that follow were taken in our town, many in our yard, by my husband, Norm Smith. Thank you, Norm!  

 Of course, there are the usual suspects, like squirrels—multitudes of them busily going about their squirrel lives. They dig anywhere and everywhere they imagine an interesting treat might lurk beneath the soil, leaving lawns pock-marked, freshly planted seedlings strewn here and there with their roots trailing, and bulbs dug up only to be abandoned when they prove not to be nuts.

  Whole squirrel dramas play out, most notably a family saga we recently witnessed through our upstairs bathroom window. Over the course of three days, a mother squirrel initiated her three babies into the acrobatic leaps their survival would require. Time and again she leapt from the roof of our back porch to a dangling branch on the other side of the driveway and then returned to the roof only to demonstrate the daring feat yet once more. One by one they caught on, made the leap, and vanished from the roof until only the smallest meekest one was left. But eventually he too mastered the feat and then the drama was over.

Here’s a favorite squirrel photo, as well as photos of two other cute furry things that hang around: a bunny and a chipmunk.

 

Wild turkeys haven’t always been a feature of our suburban town. They only began showing up as the woodsy areas to the west of us gradually shrank. Now they are regular fixtures, roosting in our neighbor’s trees, foraging for seeds and bugs in our lawns, and pecking at their reflections in the hubcaps of cars. (Apparently they think they are seeing rival turkeys.) Obviously turkeys reproduce, but we saw young turkeys for the first time only last week. A mother turkey was leading four of her children up the street, perhaps showing them the best places to forage.

  In my first Knit & Nibble, Murder, She Knit, the turkeys were part of a subplot involving a stray kitten that turned up one chilly night on my protagonist’s porch. Pamela had been feeding the kitten but had been unable coax it indoors or even get near enough to befriend it. Then one evening a gobbling troop of wild turkeys came parading up Orchard Street. Pamela’s daughter opened the door to see what the sound was, and the kitten, terrified by the turkeys, dashed inside. From then on, it was a permanent member of the household and a permanent character in the series.

 

Solitary turkey strutting up our street

 Like my protagonist, I live in a very old wood-frame house, and like my protagonist’s house it has what realtors call a “lemonade porch”—alluding to a perhaps imagined era when people spent leisure hours in the summer relaxing outdoors and chatting with neighbors. Under the lemonade porch and accessible through openings on either side of the front steps is a safe and sheltered space as large as the porch. In the decades we’ve lived in our house, that space has served as a home for various creatures.

 The first we noticed, long ago, was a possum—seemingly quite a young possum.

 

Young possum

More recently, another possum has been showing up at the back of our house, a reddish-blond possum attracted to the water dish we put out for a local cat. I’ve seen it slinking through our shrubbery, on our porch helping itself to water, and even grooming itself in such a catlike manner that at first I took it for a cat with a strange almost hairless tail. This possum has not yet sat for a portrait.

The next inhabitants of the space beneath the porch were raccoons, so many and various that it seemed a mother had nested there, given birth, and nurtured her children until they were old enough to make their own way in the world.           

Raccoons, too, play a part in Murder, She Knit. Pamela’s first impression of Richard Larkin, the handsome architect whose arrival on Orchard Street launches the series’ romantic subplot, is a negative one. From her kitchen window she can see the mess the raccoons have made of his garbage, a mess to which he is apparently oblivious—until he meets Pamela face to face and is suddenly smitten.

This raccoon surprised my husband recently by staring back at him through a bathroom window that looks out on the roof of the back porch.

 

Inquisitive raccoon

We also once had a family of skunks residing under the lemonade porch, occasionally making themselves available for glimpses in the yard. One evening I looked down from the edge of the deck behind our house and saw the mother skunk leading a whole procession of smaller skunks through a patch of ivy.

Here’s a photo from last winter, a very furtive skunk making its way along the wooden fence at one edge of our backyard.

 

Furtive skunk

Just a few days ago, my husband was descending the porch steps when a fox scurried out and dashed away. We’d seen the fox before, crossing the street and slinking through yards. It’s likely a female if it’s the same fox in the photo a neighbor posted on the town listserv—observing watchfully as her three young cubs tussle.

I don’t have that photo but here’s the neighborhood fox hanging out near the railroad tracks at the edge of town.

 

Deer have been the most recent arrivals. They’ve been displaced from a stand of woods that the county turned into a park by substituting lawns for trees. Now they roam through our yards, feasting on our landscaping. Local garden centers even label shrubs, perennials, and annuals with tags that indicate they are “deer-resistant.”

 The deer started coming around only after the Knit & Nibble series was well along, and so have only recently been incorporated into my plots. In Knit & Nibble #10, Knitmare on Beech Street, Pamela is summoned next door to marvel at the doe that has wandered into Richard Larkin’s backyard. The magic moment created by the appearance of this beautiful creature on a summer evening compensates for the fact that it’s helping itself to the plantings in the perennial bed.

Here are twins so young they still have their fawn spots and a camera-shy stag, both  photos taken right from our front yard. The reclining doe was photographed in the park.

 

Not all my Knit & Nibble characters are responsive to magic moments involving deer. In Knit & Nibble #12, coming next year, Roland DeCamp, the corporate lawyer who joined Pamela’s knitting club in pursuit of a soothing hobby that would help with his blood pressure, complains that the deer are eating all of his wife’s plants. Nell Bascomb, whose views on nearly everything are the opposite of Roland’s, observes that the deer were in Arborville before the people arrived. Roland responds, “But we’re here now.”

The deer aren’t the only creatures that ravage gardens. Here’s a photo of the neighborhood groundhog going after our neighbor’s squash vine.

As a reminder that life-and-death dramas are playing out in nature as we go about our suburban lives, this fearsome vulture alighted in the driveway of the church next to our house last month.

 

Vulture

Paradoxically, one of the creatures most associated with domesticity—and what is suburban life if not domestic?—is a descendent of forbears that would strike terror into suburban hearts were they to pop out from under a porch or meet one’s gaze through a bathroom window. I refer of course to the . . . cat, whose wild ancestors roamed the savannahs long, long ago.

 

Not looking too fearsome...