I set out natural stone salt-licks year-round for deer on the perimeter of the land I occupy [I’ve witnessed birds, and I suspect other wildlife enjoy/require them too].

I buy bags of apples on sale and try to set out 5 lbs a couple evenings per week for the deer during winter; I cut up a few for possums and rabbits nightly. I set out all spent fruit too, rather than composting.

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I feel like the salt lick, the small sweet apples and fruit scraps are my insignificant attempt at respect, alms, honoring and reparations for all we have destroyed — and for the survivors who endure and remain in the middle of a cold winter. This is agro country, and not a speck of corn or fruit is left behind for wild animals in the barren cornfields and orchards that were once forests filled with acorns, walnuts, pine nuts, pawpaws and twigs — and prairies filled with grasses, herbs, seeds and wildflowers.

The deer venture so close to the house to feast on the winter-hardy kale in my kitchen garden and like to pick the remnants of other vegetable stems. I will plant a plot of kale far from the house just for them and do more of Indigenous Three Sisters circle planting this year.

To paraphrase a problematic contemporary writer who still writes exquisitely about nature:

“feed the damn bears, feed the widlife” – we owe them a means of survival or even a mere kindness, because we have destroyed their habitats and migration routes on land, rivers, and oceans with farms, cities, highways, industry, dams, ranches, logging, shipping, cruising, oil rigs, landfills and suburban sprawl.

It is a dangerous and radical proclamation to say “feed the wildlife”, because we know desensitization to and encounters with humans are among the greatest dangers to the remaining bears and wolves and mountain lions here – all of our great North American predators. Of course, this does not mean to feed the bears, bison and elk and other wildlife – great and small – in National Parks or in state and county preserves and forests, but a call to those who occupy, hold or hoard the millions of acres of “private real estate” in huge swaths or individual parcels.

It is also not lost on me in a painful, mindfuck ouroboros that the very apples I set out for deer come from orchards that destroyed their habitat in the first place or that the birdseed I buy comes from farms that destroy habitat and in fact, use “control and kill” measures against red-winged blackbirds, starlings and other bird species en masse to prevent them from eating the seed before it can be harvested, packaged and sold to me for profit to fill my feeders and feed it back to their survivors.

The night is so alive when humans are asleep and less actively dangerous.

Bring on the night.

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