Wild Kingdom 7-22-12

Wild Kingdom    7-22-12

I was all ticked off at the beginning of the story on CBS Sunday Morning: Someone had stolen all of the flags from the service members’ graves in Hudson, NY just a couple of days before July Fourth.  Then it happened again, and a third time.  By then, the cemetery caretaker (an Army veteran) had announced “… a $500 reward for the capture and conviction of the dirtbags who did this.”  At that point, the police had had enough and set up motion activated security cameras.  (Why it took them three times of losing the flags, is beyond me.  Maybe they had to wrest it out of the hands of the middle school principal.)  It didn’t take long for them to catch the culprit: a groundhog.  It was the TV interviewer (probably from CBS with the big bucks) who stuck a camera into a groundhog hole (burrow? Den? House?) and you could see a flag there.  

Then the question becomes: why? Were the groundhogs redecorating? Are they unpatriotic and does every one of those varmints think the US flag represents terror?  Are they mad at the caretaker? Do they just like red, white, and blue? Come to think of it, can groundhogs even see color? (I know that dogs don’t because they lack the rods and cones combination in the eye that humans have.)

Shortly after that, I was in the bathroom, powdering my nose.  This is my best vantage point to my back yard flowers, sounds, and fire pit.  And there is an unbelievable racket going on. Many crows (I could see eight, but it sounded like more) are squaking and screaming like crazy.  “Must be a cat,” I thought since my new neighbors have two outdoor cats. (One likes my front porch and the other one likes my tiny back deck.  I think it’s quieter here for them and the hunting’s good in the overgrown weeds.)  But as hard as I try to find even one cat, I can’t see any.  So what set off the crows? Were they witnessing local ground hogs stealing flags?

More in the wild kingdom mode: it’s my frogs.  Technically, they are in my neighbor’s swamp, but I consider them my frogs. (That’s on the other side from the cats.) It’s not really a swamp, but a marshy area created by a rivulet branching off from the Mill River.  Or maybe it’s the Fort River – I wasted 10 minutes Googling and I’m guessing it’s the Fort River because the Mill River seems to be in North Amherst and I’m in South Amherst.  All right, I confess: I have Googled both “swamp” and “marsh” and both are correct in this instance.  I had always thought of a swamp as more dense and smelly, but my neighbor does indeed have a swamp.  And I’m used to the Boston saltwater marshes that smell awful at low tide, but I’m comfortable calling this a marshy area.  But I digress.

So it used to be three frogs that I would hear outside my bathroom window, approximately 60 feet away.  Now it’s a bucket load of frogs that sing all night, apparently, because they are always singing in the wee hours of the morning when I get up to go to the bathroom.  And they all have the low, bass, tones of a thick rubber band stretched across a cigar box.  It’s quite a symphony at night, coupled with a light show.  

That would be my solar powered color changing ball stuck in the middle of the brown eyed susans.  Last night I thought I was hallucinating.  No, the hardest drink I had had was pomegranate juice mixed with mango-nectarine juice.  The ball appeared to be moving laterally!  I finally figured out that it was the brown eyed susans blowing in the breeze.  But then I noticed that there was no breeze. So I began to wonder if it were a critter brushing past the lit up ball.  Or maybe more than one critter.  It’s the stuff that ghost stories are made of because at that moment, the mother of all lightning bugs floated by, adding to the otherwise boring spectacle in the pitch black yard.  

Perhaps it was a cat since I have noticed the tabby going into those flower beds frequently. He totally disappears in the vegetation.  I don’t know if he’s hunting or using the flower beds as kitty litter.  At any rate, one of the cats left me a present of a mouse on the driveway for me.  I was going to get into my car to go to work and I see this almost perfect (one puncture) dead mouse in the driveway.  I thought that I would have to get a shovel to move it after work, but when I got home, it was gone.  The cat probably thinks I’m ungrateful and didn’t want the present to go to waste.  Or maybe the crows thought it was starters for their dinner …