Watched by Wild Animals. Enos A. Mills
what did these “rock-rabbits” eat? They were fat and frolicking the year around.
The following September I came near Rocky again. He was standing on top of a little haystack—his haystack. All alone he was working. This was his food supply for the coming winter; conies are grass and hay eaters. A hay harvest enables the cony to live on mountain tops.
Rocky’s nearly complete stack was not knee-high, and was only half a step long. As I stood looking at him and his tiny stack of hay, he jumped off and ran across the rocks as fast as his short legs could speed him. A dozen or so steps away he disappeared behind a boulder, as though leaving for other scenes.
But he came running back with something in his mouth—more hay. This he dropped against the side of the stack and ran off again behind the boulder.
I looked behind the boulder. There was a small hay field, a ragged space covered with grass and wild flowers, surrounded with boulders and with ice and old snow at one corner. Acres of barren rocks were all around and Long’s Peak rose a rocky crag high above.
Back from the stack came the cony and leaped into the field, rapidly bit off a number of grass blades and carrying these in his mouth raced off for the stack. The third time he cut off three tall, slender plant stalks and at the top of one a white and blue flower fluttered. With these stalks crosswise in his teeth, the stalks extending a foot each side of his cheeks, he galloped off to his stack.
Many kinds of plants were mixed in this haystack. Grass blades, short, long, fine, and coarse; large leaves and small; stalks woody and stalks juicy. Flowers still clung to many of these stalks—yellow avens, alpine gentians, blue polemonium, and purple primrose.
The home of Rocky was at approximately 13,000 feet. The cony is found over a belt that extends from this altitude down to 9,500. In many regions timberline splits the cony zone. In this zone he finds ample dwelling places under the surface between the rocks of slides and moraines.
Conies appear to live in rock-walled, rock-floored dens. I have not seen a cony den in earth matter. With few exceptions all dens seen were among the boulders of moraines or the jumbled rocks of slides. Both these rock masses are comparatively free of earthy matter. Dens are, for the most part, ready-made. About all the cony has to do is to find the den and take possession.
In the remains of a caved moraine I saw parts of a number of cony dens exposed. The dens simply were a series of irregularly connected spaces between the boulders and rock chunks of the moraine. Each cony appears to have a number of spaces for sleeping, hay-stacking, and possibly for exercise. One cony had a series of connected rooms, enough almost for a cliff-dweller city. One of these rooms was filled with hay, and in three others were thin nests of hay.
These dens are not free from danger. Occasionally an under-cutting stream causes a morainal deposit to collapse. Snowslides may cover a moraine deeply with a deposit of snow and this in melting sends down streams of water; the roof over cony rooms leaks badly; he vacates.
Photo. by Frank Palmer
Goat-land
Slide rock—the home of the cony—frequently is his tomb. All cliffs are slowly falling to pieces, and occasionally a clinging mass weighing hundreds and possibly thousands of tons lets go and down the slide rock it tumbles, bounding, crushing, and tearing. The conies that escape being crushed come out peeved and protesting against unnecessary disturbances.
One day while crossing the heights there came a roaring and a crashing on the side of a peak that rose a thousand feet above the level of the plateau. A cloud of rock dust rose and filled the air completely for several minutes. As the echoes died away there were calls and alarmed cries of conies. Hastening to the bottom of a slope of slide rock I found scattered fragments of freshly broken rocks. A mass had fallen near the top of the peak and this had crashed down upon the long slope of slide rock, tearing and scattering the surface and causing the entire slope of a thousand feet or more to settle. I could hear a subdued creaking, groaning, and grinding together, with a slight tumble of a fragment on surface.
This slide had been temporarily changed into a rock glacier—a slow, down-sliding mass of confused broken rocks. Its numerous changing subterranean cavities were not safe places for conies.
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Numbers of conies were “Skee-eking” and scampering. Weasels were hurrying away from the danger zone. Possibly a number of each had been crushed.
The conies thus driven forth probably found other dens near by, and a number I am certain found welcome and refuge for the night in the dens of conies in undisturbed rocks within a stone’s throw of the bottom of the slide.
The upper limits of the inhabited cony zone present a barren appearance. Whether slide or moraine, the surface is mostly a jumble of rocks, time-stained and lifeless. But there are spaces, a few square feet, along narrow ledges or in little wind-blown or water-placed piles of soil, which produce dwarfed shrubs, grasses, and vigorous plants and wild flowers.
Dried food in the form of hay is what enables the cony to endure the long winters and to live merrily in the very frontier of warm-blooded life. In this zone he lives leisurely.
Rocky placed his haystack between boulders, beneath the edge of the big flat rock on which he sat for hours daily, except during haymaking time. As soon as the stack was dry he carried the hay down into his underground house and stacked it in one or more of the rock-walled rooms. It appears that all cony stacks are placed by the entrance of the den, and in as sheltered a spot as possible. Rocky cut and stacked his hay during September, then early October I saw him carrying it underground.
These cony haystacks were of several sizes and many shapes. The average one was smaller than a bushel basket. I have seen a few that contained twice or even three times the contents of a bushel.
There were rounded haystacks, long and narrow ones, and others of angular shape. But few were of good form, and the average stack had the appearance of a wind-blown trash pile, or a mere heap of dropped hay. Invariably the stack was placed between or to the leeward of rocks; evidently for wind protection.
One stack in a place was the custom. But a number of times I have seen two, four, and once five stacks in collection. Near each stack collection was an equal number of entrances to cony dens.
But little is known concerning the family life of the cony. Nor do I know how long the average cony lives. A prospector in the San Juan Mountains saw a cony frequently through four years. I had glimpses of Rocky a few times each year for three years. During the second summer one of his ears was torn and the slit never united. Just how this happened I do not know.
All conies that I saw making hay were working alone. But there were five conies at work in one field. One of these haymakers was lame in the left hind foot. Each haycutter carried his load off to his stack. One stack was thirty steps from the field; the one of the lame fellow, fortunately, was only eight steps.
The cony is a relative of the rabbit, the squirrel, the beaver, and the prairie dog. Although he has a home underground, he spends most of his waking hours outdoors. Above ground on a rock he sits—in the sunshine, in cloud, and even in the rain.
Except during harvest, or when seeking a new home, he works but little. Much of the time he simply sits. On a rock that rises two feet or more above the surrounding level he sits by the hours, apparently dreaming.
By the entrance of Rocky’s den lay a large, flat slab of granite, several feet long. This was raised upon boulders. He stacked his hay beneath the edge of this outreaching slab and upon the slab he spent hours each day, except in busy haymaking time.
With back against his rock, without a move for an hour or longer, he would sit in one spot near his den. Now and then he sent forth a call as though asking a question, and then gravely listened to the responses of far-off conies. Occasionally he appeared to repeat a call as though relaying a message