I worked in a large university with a population of between thirty and forty thousand students, faculty, staff, and visitors, which was situated in a downtown neighborhood of a city with a population of around one million people. The city liked to imagine itself as a real city with real city problems and the university still touts itself as a “Metropolitan university.” We were more urban than suburban, but less urban than any real city that you would think of. It was certainly not the kind of nineteen square city blocks that would make you think of as a serious ecological environment. But animals abounded around us.
We will start small. Several times throughout my career, the campus would either discover a previously unknown beehive or would be the resting place for a travelling swarm. On one occasion, a beehive fell from a tree just outside the entrance to the library and hundreds, perhaps thousands (I wasn’t able to count them all) began swarming the area. I was walking nearby, so was the first officer on scene. I asked dispatch to have the library close up shop and asked someone to bring me some caution tape. I was about ten feet from the fallen hive and bees were landing on me, but not in any dangerous way. One passerby asked me if I was going to put up some “Police Line-Do Not Cross” tape. I asked him, “Why? The bees can’t read.” He did not think I was funny. A police car drove up and I approached the driver’s side window to talk to my officer. He refused to roll the window down and popped the truck from inside the car. I went and grabbed the caution tape and secured the area until beekeepers arrived.
Another time, on a midnight shift, we found a door open to one of the older campus restaurants. Two of us searched the entire place to make sure that there were no burglars inside. Throughout the search, I kept hearing a pinging noise, not like water onto metal but perhaps like marbles dropping onto cymbals. Once we knew that no one else was inside with us, I began searching for the noise. I found a carnival-style popcorn machine in a back hallway, a popcorn machine that I had seen thousands of times, out on the campus serving free popcorn to students. But inside, the kettle was not full of popcorn, it was full of cockroaches and every time one of them tried to fly out of the kettle, they struck the lid with a “ping” and dropped back into the kettle. I never ate popcorn on campus again.
There were lots of little stories:
One of the midnight shift officers took a photo of a herd of deer wandering through in the dark.
An owl landed on the hood of my patrol car as I drove slowly through the campus. It stared at me for several minutes before driving off.
Racoons and skunks galore, after dark. On one occasion, two of my newer officers and I had to search a construction site that had an intrusion alarm, but all we found were two juvenile skunks playing in the construction. They were not afraid of us in the least and my two young officers moved with all alacrity to the exit. We left a note for the construction workers.
During broad daylight, I saw a Red-Tailed Hawk rip a rat right off the roof of the Student Union and a Red-Shouldered Hawk pull a squirrel out of the tree. The Red-Shouldered Hawk landed in a parking lot with a squirming rodent in its talons and seemed to look around at the dozens of people who were watching and say, “Yeah, I did that,” before flying away with its lunch.
There were lost dogs all the time. I even had a leash in my gear bag. On one bright and sunny Thursday, I went on a call of two lost dogs wandering into the Social Sciences building. I arrived and saw them, a medium sized beagle mix and a small Chihuahua mix, but every time I approached, they ran away. When it looked like I had them cornered in a courtyard, I got out of my car and opened the back door in preparation of grabbing one of the dogs and throwing it in there. I was worried though, because once I grabbed one dog, I might lose the other one. But once the door opened, both dogs ran to the car and jumped in like, “Thank Goodness you found us. Please take us home.”
And finally, on a warm summer night, I responded to back up another officer on a car stop in Fraternity Row. As I approached the car stop, I saw about twenty or thirty people in the roadway, about half a block away. The officer put out that he was safe and didn’t need any assistance, so I turned to see what the party was about. I parked my car and turned on my flashers and climbed out.
“What’s going on?” I asked. The crowd parted and there, on the roadway, lay a nine foot long boa constrictor, crossing two traffic lanes. “It doesn’t belong to anyone here?” I asked.
“No,” came a chorus of voices. So I reached down and picked up the snake. I used to catch snakes as a kid, so I know to grab right behind the head to avoid getting bit (yes, even constrictors have teeth). There was now a collective gasp and one voice that said, “Nice snatch.” I think he was talking about me grabbing the snake, but I don’t know for certain. When the other officer finished his car stop, he drove to me and I asked him to open the trunk of his car.
“Nope, I’ve seen that movie,” was the response. I had him open the trunk of my car and I took the snake back to the police station. Unfortunately, the snake was unable to pass any of the field sobriety tests and was taken into custody by Animal Control.