Creatures Great & Not So Great

In my years in Anderson Valley, from the late 1950s to the late 1980s, I experienced plenty of local wildlife: a sea of baby toads on every sandbank along lower Rancheria Creek in early summer, occasional turtles in the Navarro River, rarely seen foxes and (back then) coyotes, the sounds and paw prints (though never the sight) of mountain lions, native snails with flattened, “sideways” shells, eels in the rivers and creeks, jack rabbits bolting from the brush, coveys of quail bursting forth on whirring wings and more. These were familiar events for those of us living away from town and Highway 128. Most of these encounters were pleasant and not dangerous, but a few were problematic, dangerous, humorous and sometimes all three.