Wildlife to Grace — buzz off!

  • Spring has been cool this year. Not ‘cool’ as in ‘neato’ … just colder than we want. But the sun­light was dap­pling through this after­noon, and so I decided to go out­side when I let Clemen­tine into the back yard for her 2:00 Check Stuff Out duty.

    Clemen­tine has been get­ting more barky as she sheds a lit­tle of her pup­py­ish dopey-ness and begins the busi­ness of being a dog, so she requires the occa­sional time out­side to assure her­self that all’s well. It’s not that rare for her to pick up the scent of some­thing or other and start mak­ing a fuss at long-gone cats and other ne’er-do-wells, so I tuned her out when she started bark­ing at the fence.

    Besides, I had my own mys­tery going on.

    As I did some prun­ing of some of the more ridicu­lously jungle-like shrubs near our big maple tree, the res­i­dent car­di­nals started ‘twip-twip’ing at me. Car­di­nals usu­ally have a beau­ti­ful song — though some­times a bit too repet­i­tive — but this sin­gle note ‘twip’ call is saved for when they’re feel­ing aggres­sive. And since both the male and the female were direct­ing it at me, I fig­ured I must be com­ing close to a nest, but I couldn’t see how I could be when the nest was bound to be much higher than the shrubs.

    Then I spied him. There was a lit­tle brown fledg­ling sit­ting at about eye level to me. He was look­ing kind of stoned, like baby birds always look, but also just a lit­tle con­cerned about all the fuss. He had prob­a­bly been doing some of that Fly­ing Thing that his folks made look so easy and was try­ing to shake off his lat­est mis­cal­cu­la­tion. He even stayed put long enough for me to go into the house, get the cam­era and take some pic­tures. (Leaves got in the way of every shot, so I ended up hav­ing to draw him later.)

    So I con­sid­ered it an event­ful enough trip out­side already when I stepped over to the fence to see why Clemen­tine hadn’t stopped bark­ing. I hardly needed to catch a quick flip­ping motion in the grass and find that I was about to step onto a very stressed-out-looking snake.

    Now, luck­ily for me, snakes aren’t some­thing that scare me in a big way. I’m not good with scur­ry­ing things, but I had lizards and such when I was a kid, and so skit­ter­ing and slith­er­ing things don’t bother me. Besides, it was obvi­ous that this ol’ boy wasn’t about to try a slither — Clem had worked him into such a snit that he was curled up as tight as a ball of yarn. (Snakes are deaf, by the way, but they can detect changes in heat and pres­sure by flick­ing their tongues, and this one was prob­a­bly irri­tated by Clem’s bark­ing.) He did try his best to strike me, but since he wasn’t very fast or very close, his best wasn’t all that good and I took a cou­ple pic­tures between his feints.

    In the end though, I couldn’t see leav­ing him on our side of the fence. I had no rea­son to think he was any­thing but a garter snake (which is what he turned out to be — an East­ern Garter Snake), but I didn’t want to worry about step­ping on him again. So I found a long branch and used it to even­tu­ally shoo him back under the fence. He didn’t like the idea though. The brushes with the stick made him so mad he tried strik­ing up at me and man­aged to get a good two feet or so up, to my sur­prise. (When I told Greg this part of the story later, he thought I was Sheena of the Jun­gle for hang­ing in there.)

    So the lessons to this story are:

    1. Be good to your feath­ered and scaled friends, even when they act like jerks
    2. Keep a stick and a cam­era in close proximity
    3. Pay atten­tion to your dog occasionally


    Related posts:

    1. And another thing about fall …
    2. Dog with leaves
    3. Angry wildlife, part II
    4. Angry wildlife

    May 13th, 2006 | Grace | 3 Comments |

3 Responses and Counting...

  • Mimi 05.13.2006

    Wow! What an event­ful walk.

    I’ve only seen Car­di­nals when I was in Ken­tucky and Ten­nessee sev­eral years ago — they are so bril­liant red!

  • Grace

    Yep, I’m glad things usu­ally aren’t quite THAT eventful.

    Car­di­nals are really pretty lit­tle things, and the great thing about them is that they’re not all that shy, so you get to see them a lot. We’ve got other inter­est­ing blue­birds and yel­low birds, but you barely catch a glimpse of them.

  • This Side of Glory » Blog Archive » Amaz­ing road­kill sights on Hwy. 54

    […] (Deja vue: Other ani­mal sight­ings — live ones, by the way — recorded here have been owl, bald eagle and a baby cardinal/snake combo.) […]

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