The Hanover Scene

Animal Town

Pedestrian traffic on South Main Street was thrown into a tizzy one morning not long ago by a pair of raccoons. Vacationing shoppers variously dashed into doorways, screamed, or snapped pictures as Hanov er's finest, assisting Humane Officer Stanley J. Milo, attempted to nab the fleeing duo.

Normally nocturnal, this pair had been caught out at dawn like a couple of celebrating ]Broadwayites. They were finally treed over on School Street, but one escaped while his partner was being collared with a "choke pole." Officer Milo later released his captive miles away in Plainfield.

Many of the comments we gathered at the time by listening to the excited visitors raved about "wild animals running through the streets." One downcountry sage even referred to Hanover as a "frontier town."

Which of course it is in the sense that within its corporate limits the two worlds that we call "civilized" and "natural" stand face to face. And while ever-spreading development has gobbled up hundreds of acres of formerly open land, the steady abandonment of family farming has allowed even more acreage to revert to forestland. Thus the confrontation has become quite lively in recent years.

Even in the middle of downtown the statistics are impressive: two years ago Milo removed 222 skunks from their Main Street homes (though Milo's title is Humane Officer, skunks do not qualify for release and are killed). And nowhere in the village, thanks to legions of raccoons, is it prudent to store garbage in cans without tightlyclosing, locking lids.

Many alumni will recall packs of dogs that once roamed free in Hanover, often even knocking down small children outside the Village Green to get their ice cream cones. That era ended in 1973, when Town Meeting voted to restrain all dogs within the Sewer District boundaries. (During the debate one dog lover suggested that canines be restrained only during certain hours, upon which the late, inimitable Miss Maude French stood to ask rhetorically, "If you can't even keep 'em from messing on your neighbor's lawn, how are you going to teach 'em to tell time?") And the ecological vacuum left by the absent dogs has been filled by raccoons, skunks, and porcupines. Milo once even removed a ferret that had moved into winter quarters in an apartment on West Wheelock Street, and another time checked out a report of an otter chasing a postman.

Meanwhile, as little as a mile from the center of the village, deer and even coyotes are surprisingly abundant. Returning late at night from a performance at the Hop to our home in Etna, we see deer in the road at least as often as not. The coyotes are more elusive. The best time to see them is in the spring, bouncing like trampolinists in the open fields as they hunt mice for their pups. A protracted wail of the fire siren will set them howling on the hillsides, when they are about, at any time of night or day.

Every September finds a lovesick bull moose (usually suffering as well from a disorienting disease called brainworm) wan dering through Norwich; this year we found fresh moose tracks along Upper Dogford Road near Reg Pierce's hostelry in Hanover Center. With depressing frequency, local gunmen succumb to the temptation to shoot these bumbling vagrants, and their huge corpses are found the next day or so in a roadside ditch.

Among Hanover's most reclusive inhabitants are a surprisingly large number of bears. Officer Milo receives occasional panicky phone calls from recent immigrants who report seeing invariably "huge" black bears and want to know what to do. With admirable restraint, he soberly counsels doing nothing, except keeping children and dogs away from them, especially if there are cubs in evidence.

Local beekeepers are forced to take more active measures. For as everyone who has read Winnie the Pooh knows, bears love honey. After losing his bees twice to these nocturnal raiders, Arthur Gerstenberger of Etna surrounded his hives with an'electric fence. Occasional surprised grunts in the night affirmed that it worked like a charm.

But the wildlife-spotting award of the year goes to Mary Young of Hanover Center. Sitting quietly in the woods behind her house looking for warblers, she was startled by a peripheral movement. "All of a sudden it was a big movement," she says, "and a bald eagle, at least as big as I am, glided across the treetops right in front of me and the dog! It was amazing! It's a good thing the dog didn t see it, or he'd never leave the house again!"

We can't help but wonder: if the sight of two confused raccoons is enough to send the tourists scurrying into the Bookstore, how would they respond if they see eagles perched on the Baker Tower railings? Which is not as far-fetched as it may seem. Wait till the eagles discover that Alpha Delt is currently harboring a pet pig.