Bird's nest

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There is a bird’s nest in the dogwood tree just outside our courtyard door.

I first noticed it not long ago, because all of a sudden there was a big puddle of birdsplat on our walkway, in front of our door. I looked up, and –

There it was!

Stupid mama bird. She built her nest no more than seven or eight feet off the ground, in the branches of that silly tree. Did she think her kids would be safe there? Some scheming badger or cat or raccoon will surely see it and pull it down sooner or later.

Then I looked up the other morning and saw this:

I hope these children live to see adulthood.

I hope they don’t die of the heat.

I hope their mamma brings them something.

I hope they learn to fly.

(Postscript: a few days after I took the above photo, the kids weren’t there anymore. Either they’ve been eaten by a predator, or they’ve flown away.

(I hope it’s the latter.)

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Geese gone wild

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When it rains, the geese take over the greenspace near the Providence River. There are usually at least a couple dozen of them – big fat waddlers, with beautiful light-and-dark markings. I took this photo yesterday morning:

Lots of good eatin’ there! But wild geese are tough. My sister and brother-in-law had some wild geese fly over their farm back in the 1970s, and shot a few, and Susan prepared one for Thanksgiving, and – well, we couldn’t even chew it. Wild geese get a lot of exercise.

And geese are rumored to be foul-tempered. I’m always a little timid when they’re standing in front of me on the sidewalk; I never know when I’m gonna get stampeded and squawked at. They’re smaller than me, individually, but they outnumber me. They could swarm me.

And then there are the poops. Kids, there is nothing in the world quite so vile-looking as a goose poop. It’s a big green slimy-looking thing about the size of a small cigar. And geese poop a lot. (My mother always used the expression “go like a goose.” Evidently she knew what she was talking about.)

But I like to watch them. The other day, I saw two of them pecking at one another, running around aimlessly in a circle and honking.

Get it? Wild goose chase.

Ha ha.

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Skunk hour

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The Providence area is full of wildlife. I wrote about fisher cats not long ago, nasty weaselly things prowling down by the riverside. Foxes are being seen this summer all over the East Side (though I haven’t seen one yet, and I would love to, because I think they’re cute). Bunnies are everywhere. Ditto big ugly garbage-eating raccoons. Ditto possums, one of which hissed at me a few years ago when I passed it on the street.

And then there are skunks.

They’re always smaller than I think they’re going to be, like kittens. Their colors are lovely. But they’re alarming, for obvious reasons, or maybe just for one very obvious reason.

I can usually smell them when they’re in the neighborhood. Either I’m especially sensitive to their scent, or my rural upbringing makes me more aware of them. (Our old family dog back in the 1960s got sprayed more than once, and I can still hear him whining and crying in my mind.)

I was coming out of the local market one recent evening. It’s only about two blocks away from our apartment, and I have my choice of two routes home: a dull route that goes straight down the avenue, and another much more interesting sidewalk that winds up the hillside and is surrounded by shrubbery. I usually choose the winding sidewalk for the sake of aesthetics (even though I know that robbers and muggers are probably waiting among the shrubs to jump me), and so I did the other night.

But a young skinny guy was coming down the walk toward me, jabbering at me. I thought (charitably) that he was speaking on his Bluetooth, but then he approached me with an earnest look on his face. “There’s a skunk up there!” he exclaimed. “At the top of the path! He’s looking very – territorial!”

“Which way was he facing?” I said. “Toward you, or away from you?”

“Toward me,” he said. “But he wasn’t moving, and he had a determined look on his face.”

That was enough for me. I thanked Mr. Skinny Bicycle for saving me from a fate worse than death, and went home via the dull safe route.

Here are the last four stanzas of Robert Lowell’s great poem, “Skunk Hour”:

One dark night,
my Tudor Ford climbed the hill's skull;
I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . .
My mind's not right.

A car radio bleats,
"Love, O careless Love. . . ." I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat. . . .
I myself am hell;
nobody's here--

only skunks, that search
in the moonlight for a bite to eat.
They march on their soles up Main Street:
white stripes, moonstruck eyes' red fire
under the chalk-dry and spar spire
of the Trinitarian Church.

I stand on top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air--
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail.
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.

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Saving the rhinos

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“I know how to save the rhinos,” my co-worker Apollonia announced at lunch the other day. “Really. It amazes me that no one has thought of this before.”

“Enlighten us,” I said.

She eyed me balefully. “You’ll think this is stupid, I know. But hear me out. People are killing rhinos because they want their horns, right? The greatest threat to rhinos is human beings, because they want their horns. So we corral all the rhinos, and tranquilize them, and remove their horns. Then there’s no reason for the poachers to kill them.”

I didn’t respond right away. Finally I covered my nose with my hand and said: “Ow!”

She scowled. “It wouldn’t hurt them. A rhino horn is made of keratin. It’s like a fingernail. They don’t need it.”

“How do you know that?”

“It’s obvious.”

“What if it’s necessary to life as a rhino? What if –“

“Oh, they don’t use it for anything. They prance around, and jab one another with it.”

“Maybe,” I said, “girl rhinos judge boy rhinos by their horns. Maybe girl rhinos won’t be interested in boy rhinos anymore if the boy rhinos don’t have horns.”

“You,” Apollonia declared, “have no idea what you’re talking about.”

I ignored the obvious ridiculousness of this statement. “Okay,” I said. “So now what?”

“So,” Apollonia said, eyes glittering, “we need to put the idea out there. On the Internet.”

“Geez,” I said. “I don’t know anything about the Internet. How would we do a thing like that? Unless you want me to write about it in my blog, and use your real name - ”

“No!” she shrieked. “Don’t you dare!”

So there you are, kids.

Of course, there are also groups like rhinoconservation.org, which address the issue more directly.

But think about dear Apollonia’s idea.

Not very good, is it?

But her heart is in the right place.

Go visit rhinoconservation.org, and see what you think.

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Bears of the USA

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Bears are back in New England!

 

 

A bear was sighted in North Kingstown, Rhode Island only a few days ago. And there have been bears sighted on Cape Cod too. (Which is interesting, because they’d either have to clamber over one of the two bridges to the Cape, or ride on top of a vehicle to get there. Or swim. Or ride a floating log across the Cape Cod Canal. Or commandeer someone’s Humvee. Nothing’s impossible.)

 

 

Well, it’s like the Middle Ages around here.  The bear here in Rhode Island knocked over a chicken coop and made off with one of the chickens!

 

 

Our stuffed polar bear, Carbuncle, has his own thoughts on the subject. (Carbuncle, you might recall, won the Financial Times crossword puzzle contest about a year ago. This is a picture of him wandering the neighborhood last winter):

 

 

 

 

First of all: Carbuncle is glad that the bears are back. He’s less lonely now.

 

 

Second: Carbuncle wonders what kind of bears are back. Polar bears? Probably not. Ah well. Less competition for those tasty seals:

 

 

 

 

Also: will this mean less pick-a-nick baskets for Carbuncle to steal from friends and neighbors?

 

 

I direct you to the following cartoon for more information:

 

 

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Cats

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Sometimes, when I walk home the long way, I meet a little black cat on East Manning Street, about a block and a half away from my house.

 

 

She invariably comes running to meet me. We have a little routine: I point at her, and she immediately rolls on the ground very submissively.

 

 

I don’t know if the little black cat does this trick for everyone, but she certainly does it for me. I choose to believe that Little Black Cat is the first recruit for my Unholy Army of the Night, and she will do whatever I say. (Well, she rolls over for me, doesn’t she?)

 

 

(Of course, this usually happens in warm weather, and the warm pavement probably feels good to roll on, when you’re a little black cat.)

 

 

I used to have cats in Tunisia. My housemate Catriona and I inherited a strange little cat named Nimmer (Arabic for “tiger”), who went feral every winter and came home every spring. Then there were all of the street / alley cats who used to come in to share Nimmer’s food. (I gave Nimmer sardines. I love sardines, and so did he. And so did all of the other cats.)

 

 

Nimmer used to wait until I lay down to read a book, then crawl on top of me and breathe sardine breath into my face. Also he had all of his claws, and he used them when he climbed on top of me.

 

 

But cats are cats. In North Africa, they’re allowed to run wild, to keep the rat/mouse population at bay. It’s not considered a good idea to feed them, as they’ll get lazy and stop killing rats and mice.

 

 

Here in the USA, they’re friendly and decorative.

 

 

(But, like the little black cat down the street, they can still be part of my Unholy Army of the Night.)

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My mother, the killer

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We were a gun-totin’ family.  My father had at least half a dozen hunting rifles, of which he was very proud.  After his death, my mother kept one (loaded) in her bedroom, for emergencies.

 

 

Yes, I know. Mammy Yokum. Ma Kettle. But she knew how to use it.

 

 

She continually fought moles in her beloved garden; she set traps for them, mean little miniature bear-traps, stuffed down into their burrows.  (If you’ve ever seen a mole, you know how small and delicate they are.  But, to my mother, they were Lucifer incarnate, because they ruined her garden.) Sometimes, however, they triggered the traps and then ran away unharmed, and this infuriated her.  So she came up with the idea of chaining the trap to a metal post.

 

 

One morning she looked out the window to see the post rocking back and forth frantically.  Moles (as I said) are pretty small.  She’d obviously caught something much bigger.

 

 

It turned out to be a big mean angry badger.  It was caught fast, and it growled at her and ran back and forth, and tried to get free

.

 

And she shot it dead.

 

 

Story number two:

 

 

On one of my visits to her in the earlyt 1990s, I woke in the middle of the night to hear an odd scraping sound outside. Mom’s house was miles from anywhere, out in the woods, so there was normally complete silence outside, apart from wind and rain and the howling of coyotes. I mentioned this at breakfast. She looked grim. “I heard it too,” she said. “Goddamned porcupine.  Chewing on the back steps. I’ll get it one of these days.”

 

 

(Editorial note: porcupines like to chew on wood that’s been handled by human beings. The wood gets impregnated with salt – generally from our sweat.  And porcupines are infatuated with salty wood.  They will eat the handles of axes and mallets and hammers, just to imbibe all the delicious salt that’s in there.)

 

 

Within a few weeks after my return to Providence, Mom told me the following story:

 

 

She started waiting for the porcupine, and finally one evening, she surprised it, and came out of the house toting her rifle.  Being a smart little porcupine, he flattened himself against the house, reasoning that Mom wouldn’t be so stupid as to shoot into her own house. 

 

 

He didn’t realize how resourceful she was.  She put down her rifle, picked up a broom, and started spanking him.

 

 

Squalling, he ran from her, out into the yard.

 

 

And then she shot him.

 

 

I come from tough stock, people. 

 

 

Beware.

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