ANOTHER LIFE: The stoat peeps out between the fish-boxes, with their green stubs of chives and winter savory, makes a quick run to the beaked whale skull that leans up against the kitchen window-sill, and arrives at the top in a couple of ripples, the black tuft of its tail cocked like a dainty little finger, writes Michael Viney.
It eats, however, less than politely, scooping up gobbets of oat-flakes soaked with sunflower oil. The birds to whom the feast more properly belongs wait out the visit at a distance, swinging safely on the nuts in the hedge.
The stoat has been back on several days when we've been looking, taking its time at every snack. Shovellings of thrush and blackbird leave the window splashed with oil, so that our faces above the kitchen sink may be smeared into insignificance, but stoats have this habit of not caring very much whether people are watching or not.
How appreciative we are of being ignored by the wild. This fierce little predator has been lodging, no doubt, in a rat-hole in the ditch and ambushing a good number of the finches, tits and sparrows that flock to our feeders, yet here we are, delighted with the indifferent glitter of its gaze.
On a hillside of many rushy fields laced with dry-stone walls, a window-sill heaped with take-away food is just a fortuitous bonanza. While a stoat can live in almost any habitat with enough cover and adequate prey, it has yet to join fox and badger in the roster of notable urban wildlife.
Our stoat's appearance has coincided, as it happened, with an e-mail from Belfastman John Wilson Foster, Professor of English at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and editor of that splendid tome, Nature in Ireland: A Scientific and Cultural History (Lilliput, 1997).
"The other day," he wrote, "I walked out of my office on campus only to see a coyote stalking a grey squirrel, at a distance from me of about 50 feet. The coyote stalked in broad daylight, with a couple of people nearby, until it got to within 60 feet of the squirrel and then rushed it. It grabbed the squirrel, which managed to squirm and break free and get up a tree. This was my second sighting of a coyote on campus and both at the foot of my 12-storey office block."
The campus is on the edge of an 800-acre, heavily-wooded park. A few years ago cats began to disappear from neighbourhoods on the edge of the park, but only this year have the coyotes become emboldened to come on to campus in broad daylight. "The first one I saw," noted Foster, "had that distracted or preoccupied air we can see in footage of predators - big cats and wild dogs - on the Serengeti plain, moving impassively through and ignoring the prey animals because they're not hunting. The squirrel stalker too did not deign to look at human beings after the hunt attempt ended. These coyotes seem - at least for now - to be moving in their own space."
That seems to be true of North America's coyotes in general; despite fierce and determined persecution by farmers, the range of this middle-sized "wild dog" is actually increasing, adapted to prey as separate as lemmings on the Arctic tundra and rats at the centre of Los Angeles. Trapping and shooting remain largely ineffective controls, but in the wilds of Yellowstone National Park the reintroduction of wolves restored the proper canid hierarchy and cut the coyote population by half in two winters.
Around Vancouver, meanwhile, black bears and cougars (pumas) have begun to come down from the mountains into the built-up coastal areas. The bears are attracted by suburban garbage and in 2000, 27 of them had to be shot, one of them in the gardens of Prof Foster's own street. The solitary cougars are just as worrying - likely, it seems, to take a cyclist on a lonely road for a vulnerable moose.
Jack Foster's encounters with campus coyotes have set him to wondering about the demeanour of Ireland's urban foxes. Have they too begun to lose their look of cunning and wariness; instead of slinking, do they stroll? And what should we call the new process by which wild mammals adapt to urban sprawl? When domestic animals take off into the wild, as cats and goats can do, they are known as "feral". But a coyote chasing the campus squirrels or a cougar making prey of the local pets is scarcely becoming "domesticated".
Foxes breed in the heart of Dublin a few hundred metres from Grafton Street and this is the month when the vixen's mating screams can bring concerned night time calls to the Garda. Early fears that foxes would kill cats have faded with experience; a full-grown cat is more than a match for vulpes vulpes. Most northern carnivores are thoroughgoing opportunists; they eat what they can find. The city adds many forms of garbage to the attractions of garden bird-tables and compost heaps. Lawns are rich in earthworms, a staple food of foxes, badgers, even pine martens. The generally benign nature of our carnivores in suburban situations (though foxes eat pet rabbits, and badgers are best granted right of way) has encouraged an indulgence somewhat harder to extend to coyotes, cougars and bears.