The Critter News Report
(Critters • )
It’s warming up, O my brothers, and the critters are emerging, in part to remind us of what’s good about the winter.
Yesterday it was the season’s first poisonous snake. Mom and the kids were headed down to the river while I put some chicken in a pot and heated it up. When I got down past the back garden, the three of them were kind of huddled together next to a mat of bannanas, peering at something 20 feet away.
I took a peek, informed them it was a copperhead and trotted back up the hill for my trusty hoe. Like most good copperheads, this one just waited for me to come back and chop it into segments. Then I had the kids come and take a real close look at the body, hopefully the better to memorize the markings for next time.
One of my neighbors, when he finds poisonous snakes, puts them in a sack and drives them off to the woods somewhere rather than killing them. I understand where he’s coming from, and I try to leave anything alone that eats vermin, but I also think there’s no shortage of copperheads and cottonmouths, and I kill every one I find, because it’s too easy for the kids and dogs to bump into them accidentally. Same for the coral snakes, mild-mannered as they are, because a bite from one of those little rascals really can kill you, albeit they have to chew on you some to get their little fangs working.
Meanwhile, the goofy whistling ducks have been here for a few weeks now, back from Mexico or wherever they hang during the winter. They circle the area squeaking like idiots, then usually land about 40 feet up in one or another of the giant pecan trees everyone has around here. My digital camera has lousy zoom capabilities, which is why all my photos of them suck about as badly as the one on this page (click on it to see a good shot of one taken by a guy in Brazil).
This morning two of them were getting themselves all worked up, whistling and peeping and fussing around up in the pecan that hangs over our front driveway.
It turns out a hawk had decided to build its nest at the top of the same tree, and it was gliding off for a couple of minutes, then coming back with pretty good-sized sticks in its mouth. Every time it came back it made the ducks nervous, although I would say they’re probably too big to serve as this hawk’s prey. But they weren’t nervous enough to fly away, at least until I tried to get close enough for a good photo.
Naturally, the hawk’s nest is strategically located directly over the only wide spot in the driveway, where I like to park the company news van. I already had to start parking the van out front earlier this spring when the owls decided to hang out above the driveway half the night and shit on it.
Why do large birds hate my van?
→ B.Dunn, May 03, 2009, 09 41 am
