June 2008
photo by Jack Carson
Meet the critters at play behind Jack’s “Ivy House”
by Howard Kohn
“Siblings, yes, definitely siblings,” Jack Carson said of the squirrels as they stopped every few seconds to tease each other on a recent May afternoon. The two young gray squirrels fussed across the spreading limbs of a maple tree behind the “Ivy House” at Auburn and Elm where Jack was raised and where he still hangs his hat.
“I love having lunch out here.” He was standing on a grassy overlook he cut into the English ivy that his mother planted and that surrounds the house on three sides, but not in back. There, in a forest-like swale, several of the native creatures are in constant frolic. “I sit on my Adirondack settee and just enjoy the show.”
A different playground existed in the yard when Jack was a kid in the 1950’s, a tennis court, a jungle gym, a badminton court, a log cabin. “It was the neighborhood hangout. I didn’t lack for friends,” he said. “But then we all grew up.”
The play structures were carted away, and nature took over. Winged seeds from a matriarchal maple next door sprouted into lean saplings. Part of the lawn turned into a squishy bog through the mechanics of an underground spring.
About 30 years passed, and then one day Jack was made aware his backyard could be designated as a wildlife habitat under a standard somewhat more scientific than the universal attraction of backyards as late-night roadside cafés for garbage-scavenging raccoons and possums.
Food, water, shelter and a nesting grounds are de rigueur for official designation. Jack applied, and in 1995 his yard became one of the first in Takoma Park to receive the designation from the National Wildlife Federation and the Maryland Department of Natural Resources.
Retired now from the U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, where he made his mark as the guy who increased the federal subsidy for large housing projects, he had time on his hands on this spring day, in air pure enough to be bottled, to take visitors on a tour.
For all of nature’s good work Jack had pitched in at various spots. He had planted seedlings of sycamore, redbud and bald cypress collected at Arbor Day and had hung bird baths and suet cakes in tree branches. He had attached 15 wooden birdhouses found in a mail-order catalog.
The birdhouses are meant for wrens, but, he said, “Wrens prefer holes in trees. On the other hand, the titmouse and chickadees like the houses.” A downy woodpecker landed on a perch five feet from Jack’s head. “Most of the birds were born and raised here. This is all they’ve ever known, and I’m so familiar they don’t notice me.”
Two golden finches, braving the imperious stare of a blue jay, pecked at a feeder. Often, Jack said, his cat lounges under the feeder at peace with the birds. “I don’t know how many times I’ve come out to find the cat covered with birdfeed.” In the boggy area, along with Siberian irises, he has playfully placed a plastic alligator in a semi-submerged state. “I had it over by the fence, but one time a little boy came to a birthday party next door and saw the gator and suffered a small crisis.”
Deer have found their way up the slopes of Sligo Creek and across four blocks of intervening human habitat to rub a bare spot on a cypress limb, a territorial marking.
A tall length of trunk is all that is left of a few trees, killed by the dumbfounding luck of the only flood on record last summer in Takoma Park, or perhaps in all of drought-stricken America. A WSSC crew, at work on a fire hydrant on Elm Avenue, sprung a leak in the water main that sent a steady flow into Jack’s yard. At first it seemed a blessing, but temperate-zone trees can only tolerate so much water.
“Originally they told me two weeks to get the leak fixed,” he said. “It took four months.”
He tried to make the best of it this spring. He screwed birdhouses onto the tops of the beheaded trees.
It is probably a stretch to say that Jack’s yard started a trend. Activists like Bruce Sidwell and Ann Hofnar have been the ones promoting the idea of wildlife habitats around town in recent years with the result that now 80 backyards are officially designated, including their own, as well as four local parks and four local schoolyards. As soon as 20 additional backyards meet the specifications Takoma Park, as a municipality, will be designated a wildlife habitat.
But for which backyard has been established as the source of more personal enjoyment it seems that Jack’s is the one to beat. “Well, there’s one thing I’ve missed,” he said, musing. “I’ve never seen a Baltimore oriole here. I’ve seen a scarlet tanager, but never an oriole.”
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