It’s such an honor to achieve a small level of recognition by having something named after you.
I’ve always dreamed of an exotic sandwich or maybe a fancy ice cream dish being known worldwide as the “Ernie.”
I was not too thrilled to find out it’s a skunk, however.
This all grew out of my ongoing efforts to get good photos of our natural wildlife neighbors.
Looking to expand my collection of critter photos, I made the long trek south to set up my sophisticated camera trap in a wild area near the U.S. Forest Service Los Pinos Fire Lookout near Lake Morena.
Two friends who are lookouts there are quite familiar with the habits of the local wildlife and regularly see gray foxes, common striped skunks, chipmunks and ringtails, along with an assortment of birds.
They see these wildlife neighbors so often that they recognize most of them and have given some of them names.
Trail cameras put out by the lookouts have captured hundreds of images of each animal and those images are filed by the animal’s name.
As an example, there’s Nick, the ringtail, so named because of a nick in his right ear, and his mate is known as Gamma. Then there is Kit, their youngster, an energetic and inquisitive ball of fur with that incredibly long, banded tail.
Ringtails are not uncommon, but rarely seen. They are nocturnal and secretive, although they do seem quite comfortable around people. I had high hopes of getting at least a few good photos of the ringtail on its nightly rounds.
During the great California Gold Rush, they became known as “Miner’s Cats,” because they mingled with the prospectors and were adopted as pets by the residents of the gold camps.
I was excited at the opportunity to add these critters to my wildlife portrait gallery. The plan was to leave the remote camera in place for five days.
I had enough battery power and the capacity to record 600 images, far more than I would likely need during the five days.
On the second night, everything stopped working.
So, off I went on another 150-mile jaunt to see what went wrong.
To my surprise, there was no equipment failure. Everything had worked just fine. Perhaps, too fine.
The system had shut down because over 600 images were recorded, and the camera card was full.
That’s a lot of wildlife activity.
Rushing home, I ed the images and was thrilled with the results.
The first thing I noticed was a pattern to the wildlife visits, kind of a hierarchy, if you will.
The gray fox was always first to arrive at the water trough, followed by skunks and the ringtail.
Apparently faithful to the wildlife code, the fox showed up just at dark and hung around to be photographed several hundred times.
Later at night, a ringtail made a cameo appearance during a period of heavy fog. He hung around long enough for a half dozen photos or so.
In between, a new character made a grand entrance.
It was a spotted skunk.
The larger striped skunk has been a regular to the area, but this energetic little stinker was a new face in the neighborhood.
And quite the ham.
Despite his smaller size, about 18 inches in length, he was photographed more than 200 times, including one face-to-face encounter with a ringtail and a tail-up, handstand challenge to one of the foxes.
In case you are not familiar with skunks, a tail up is not good.
It was fire lookout Dave Fleming who first suggested that they name the new arrival Ernie.
“We need to change the spotted skunk folder to Ernie. Spot would be too obvious and predictable, so, ‘Ernie’ it is,” Fleming wrote in an email to the other lookout.
This just stinks!
Of all the places I’ve been, the mountains I’ve climbed, rivers crossed, forests and deserts explored, exotic cocktails consumed, near-Pulitzer Prize winning articles I’ve written, and I’m being honored with a skunk being named after me?
I was grumbling about the aromatic honor.
A skunk?
But leave it to Kati to offer her wifely perspective.
“You are a little stinker,” she said.
Cowan is a freelance columnist. Email [email protected] or visit erniesoutdoors.blogspot.com.
