It's more loony 'toons than call of the wild

You know I love a good nature article, one that will amaze, amuse or confuse me, even startle, horrify or repulse a little bit. I look for these articles in the news, but I didn’t expect to live them this week. Who would, really.

It started Monday with the call of a new bird and the sound of a strange cat among the chattering of birds in the jungle of our yard. I quickly spotted a little gray bird flitting among the chokecherry branches and grasses, blathering on with some sing-songy chatter, interspersed with the occasional mew — coming from the bird — a bird that says “mew.”

  Unable to effectively hunt down the bird with my camera through the window screen, I stood at the window recording audio of this strange creature for a full five minutes, as if I were the U.S.’s answer to David Attenborough. Scoff if you will, but even with only one bird book at my disposal I identified the gray catbird in under three minutes. A catbird. That makes sense.

I didn’t even know we had such a thing in the area, so I told everybody about it, even if their eyes glazed over.

Tuesday, my husband saw a jack rabbit on our place. Surely some places they’re a common critter, but not my place, the land of the cottontail bunny. I think we’ve seen maybe three in 30 years here. I don’t know why they don’t live here full time. Maybe the roving gangs of cottontails keep the land values down.

  Tuesday evening, though, was the show stopper. The robin that lives with its new family in the chokecherry tree by our living room window started raising a ruckus, like cage-match throw-down kind of ruckus. I raced to the window to see, not 2 feet from my face, a bull snake half in the nest, snacking on the baby peepers.

I raced out the door to the nest, grabbing a shovel on the way, and the snake and I battled things out for the fate of those little nestlings — at great peril to myself I might add because that angry mama robin was dive-bombing the back of my head as many times as it went after the snake.

Here’s a good tip in case you need this information in the future, a No. 2 spade is a great tool, but not the proper one for getting a bull snake out of a thick chokecherry tree. So as soon as I had the snake backed off and rethinking its choices in life, I ran out to the barn and came back armed with a hard-tined rake. Now that is a proper snake wrangling tool and an effective weapon should things turn ugly. That’s another free tip from someone with experience.

  The snake was out of the chokecherry in no time and running in a, y’know, fast slithery snake way for cover, but before it escaped under the shed mama robin still got two good shots in.

This part of the tale ends with the sad loss of one little peeper, but two lived to keep mama busy. But don’t get complacent yet, the stories are still coming.

I got into my email, expecting to tell a friend about the snake and bird story and the happy-ish ending, but instead, I have an email from her that ended with, oh by the way, I saw a herd of deer run past the house through our field and a few minutes later two wolves came through tracking the deer.

I was all gobsmacked, and what?? I had a common bull snake trying to snack on some baby birds and you had two wolves — mysterious, dangerous, controversial wolves — casually hunting deer in your field on the prairie 13 miles from town. That is bad-ay-ess-ess, girlfriend.

  I was still thinking about the wolves the next morning when I opened the front door to let the cat out, only to discover a skunk rummaging through the grass not 15 feet away. I know, the thrills keep coming.

  The sunk was neither aggressive nor particularly afraid, either, but my cat stalked out onto the front step like he was going to kick the skunk’s stinky end all the way to the county line.

I was unable to stop the cat, so I just grabbed a camera.

Nothing happened. The skunk walked over to the hillside, I got a few photos, turned around to find the cat sitting on my manure compost heap watching it, which was OK, better than getting sprayed, but boring. Right. The story goes nowhere.

As I watched my cat watch the skunk waddle its way over the hill into the wild unknown, or maybe just over to the neighbor’s to eat. I couldn’t help but think that the bull snake and the robin were a pretty good representation of nature in the throes of drama, but Tweety Catbird, Peter Jackrabbit, IRL Pepe Le Pew and the Cat in the Crap better step up their dramatic contributions if they want another mention in my column.

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I’m just saying at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40 .