Tag: wildlife

Snake-handling

I’ve been working on my fish pond lately. I thought I had the waterfall fixed. It is not fixed. It’s still leaking. However, the pond seemed to be holding well, so now I have fish! My son Jade brought me six fish from his pond on Mother’s Day and the most beautiful bouquet that’s still going strong.

He said his wife Anjie bought him the special bucket for transport. They all arrived in good condition and still are. I bought some bullfrog tadpoles a couple of weeks ago to help clean up debris in the water and PondStart to condition it. These fish are about four to six inches long, and one of them is a Shebunkin, a pondie known for its koi-like tail.

There were eight koi gracefully swimming around when we moved here. About three months later, something tore through the netting and got them all. We’re blaming raccoons. I could not bear the expense of koi when raccoons and blue herons love them so much–and so often! I decided when I got new fish, they’d be just regular goldfish or pondfish or whatever anyone calls them now. Jade’s pond regulars had had too many babies, so he was happy to give me some.

I told him about my tadpoles and snails. He said that sure is a good way to clean up a dirty pond. I said I hoped nothing got my frogs.

“Well, now, Mom,” he said, “where there are frogs, there are going to be snakes.”

Uh-oh. I was too late. The bullfrogs–and others–were already hopping around and croaking. I knew what was coming.

Monday morning, I went down to the pond to find a snake caught in the netting over the water. She was about inches inches long. I touched her with the can of fish pellets, and she moved. Her middle was free, so I found a stick, pushed it under her loop, and pulled. Oh no, she had a fat place a couple inches from her head, probably half a frog in there, I thought, and an even fatter place where she’d caught the rest of her body, no doubt with the rest of the frog in that half. The stick broke.

Cybil. She almost twisted herself into a knot!

I sat on the side of the pond for a few minutes and studied her, trying to figure out how I’d get her out of the mess she’d created. I named her Cybil–and don’t even ask me how I knew she was a female. She wasn’t poisonous. I can’t imagine trying to free, say, a copperhead. I took her photo and enlarged it so that I could see her problem up close.

I finally decided that the only way this creature would be rescued was by my own hands. I carefully held her belly loop with my left hand and peeled the net away from the back half of her body with my right. The next trick would be to get her head free and back her out of the netting.

If a psychic had told me twenty years ago that I would become a snake handler, I wouldn’t have even laughed at such ridiculousness. But, hey, here I was, inching the net away from her head, freeing her body, and laying her down on the rocks to slither away.

Now, Cybil, I thought, just stay away from the frogs, and you and I will both be happier.

***

My neighbor, VB, maintains a pond just a bit smaller than mine. She’s been interested in sharing her fish with me. She asked if I could take some of the larger ones and some water plants with little rosemary-like spikes that reach for the sun while the fish feast on the roots.

“Oh, yes,” I said, “I’d love three or four fish.”

Yesterday, she pulled out some plants and put them in a big bucket. We peeled back my net to shove it in the water and tried to arrange it to hide the pump and pipes. We did the best we could, using a long pole to push it into place before she took my net to get me some big ‘uns out of her pond. VB and I love to admire each other’s gardens. She was saying how good the waterfall looked with the moss-covered rocks and its long flow into the pool of animals at the end. I was telling her that I thought the waterfall was leaking again.

Then she gasped. I ran to her side, just knowing she’d seen a snake, and said, “What is it? What is it?”

She said, “S-s-snake.”

Here was yet another of these hapless creatures who had poked his head through the net into the waterfall. “Oh, for crying out loud,” I said. “Here we go again.”

“Oh, Di, be careful; I think it’s a copperhead!”

“I don’t think so,” I answered, trying to get a closer view of this one I’d already named Cyrus. His head looked twisted and smushed by the net’s grasp, but he wiggled his body to let me know he was still with us.

“Get a stick,” VB said. “Or maybe a pole. It’s a copperhead. It has a triangular head.”

“No, come look. It’s not. His head is just all wampused (my word) from where the net is. He’s some kind of rat snake or water snake. He’s harmless.”

She gave him a side view. “I can see now, but you know,” she said,” if it has slanted eyes, it’s poisonous.”

“Hmmm,” I said, “I’m not sure I want to get to know him well enough to look him in the eyes.”

“Let me find you a stick. Or maybe we could get that pole we were using.”

“VB,” I said, “That won’t work. I tried it on Cybil, but it didn’t work.”

“How did you get her loose?” she asked. “Did you have to cut the net?”

“No,” I said, “I just pressed and pulled on the net until I could get her free.”

“With your hands.”

“Yes.”

“Di, you make me laugh.”

“Why?” I asked as I reached for the middle of Cyrus.

“Because I can’t think of another woman that would pick up a snake.”

“Well, that’s the only way old Cyrus is going to make it. He’s slowed way down already.”

Cyrus. His head was twisted in the net and he sort of looked dead.

VB said, “I’ll get the net and go get some fish. You work with the snake, but now, I’ll help if you need me to. I will.”

I’m not sure how she would have helped, but I told her to go fishing.

Cyrus had wrapped his tail under a rock, and I could not pull it loose. He was still. VB showed up with some fish. She came over to the waterfall and said, “You can’t get him loose.”

“No,” I said, “let’s just leave him alone. I think he’s just going to have to die that way. Let’s put the fish in.”

“Well, it’s just one. They’re so big I can’t get but one in the bucket at a time.”

We lifted the net again and dumped the orange and white fellow into his new habitat. He took off to join the small ones, and pretty soon, they were following him everywhere he swam.

VB said, “I think he likes his new digs! Okay, I’m going for another one.”

I stepped back up the gravel path to the snake in the net. He was moving his bottom half, and his tail was free.

VB appeared. I told her I was going to the garage for some scissors and maybe a grabber. “I’m going to have to cut him out of this net.”

I cut around his head and neck–if a snake has a neck. He was still moving when I laid him on the path.

When we had successfully re-homed eight of her fish, we checked on Cyrus. His head had improved, and jaws lined up together. He wriggled when I touched him. A half-hour later, he was gone.

I like to think he went home to Cybil.

While I was snake-handling, VB brought at least eight big fish and a couple small ones.

My pond is full…and it’s leaking again.

Of Turkeys and Trucks

Dixie and I have been walking a little further into the neighborhood every day. Now, Dixie is a complete fraidy cat and she balks at the presence of not only garbage haulers and trailers with lawnmowers. Sometimes, she runs from oversized pickups. If it’s dusk, she’ll bark at a new shadow on the street.

A few days ago, just as we were about to reach the large gazebo next to the tennis court about the distance of three city blocks, our resident Tom Turkey gobbled from a patch of trees on a small rise. Dixie wanted nothing to do with that kind of noise. She strained on the leash to get back home.

Oh, no, you won’t!

A couple of days after that, we encountered the sizeable fellow down the hill from the walking trail. I stopped to take pictures. Dixie stared at the big bird, giving him ‘the look.’ She yanked me back to the trail.

This big guy has been here for months now, and we often see the rest of the flock, but he seems to wander around without the other birds. My daughter-in-law informs me that he’s hanging out all over our Nippers Corner area. She and my son live just a half-mile down the road and she’s quite familiar with him, she says.

VB, our closest neighbor, has had more than one visitation to her backyard by the whole flock. She’s taken photos and texted them to me.

I suppose someone has named him already but I figure it was something mundane like Tommy or Gobbler. There are people in our neighborhood, though, who might choose something more stately, say, Turner. When VB heard the story about Dixie being a bit wary of the gobbles, she said, “That poor old thing is looking for a mate.” I told her we could call him Harry the Horny. (I’d heard that title before but didn’t know when or where.)

This morning, Dixie got some early barking in when the truck came for the weekly garbage pickup. She parted the white cafe curtains to give it her best mezzo-soprano crescendo. I waited until she was sure she’d run off the noisy old vehicle before heading out on our morning walk.

Just as we made it to the bottom of our little hamlet to the main road of the development, Harry appeared in all his glory, strutting his stuff in the middle of the road. His tail fanned out and his body inflated like a hot-air balloon. Wobbling on those spindly legs, I imagined that he could float into the air. (Wild turkeys can fly: domestic ones, not so much.) Harry’s swollen hood almost blocked his eyes, and his eight-inch beard swung in the breeze. Two hens picked at the grass of the corner lot, ignoring their suitor just a few feet away.

He danced circles in the street and gobbled, repeating himself after each turn. Dixie pawed me to pick her up. When I heard vehicles coming, I stepped out into the road, my twelve-pound dog under my arm, to slow them down and point to Harry in the middle of the street. Two people rolled down their windows and thanked me. He pranced and gurgled as loud as he could, and the vehicles carefully took what was left of the pavement around His Majesty.

The minute I set Dixie down and said, “Okay, let’s go home,” Harry trotted toward me! Dixie growled and howled at the same time and was in my arms again before I could even yell at him. I broke into my fastest run. He was gaining on us when a car came down the street and honked. He turned toward the hill where the lady turkeys still blithely grazed.

I huffed and puffed, trying to recover from such an outburst of energy, and said, “Okay, Dixie, you are going to have to walk up this hill.” I set her down and that’s when the moving van appeared.

I lifted her again and she wrapped her legs around me. That dog never did pee or poop on that trip. When I got her home, I turned her loose in the part of the backyard I call the Dog Run to do her business. It’s a fenced area just right for a dog playground. I sat down on one of the old rusted lawn chairs to keep an eye on her. Our neighborhood owl could scoop her up–or maybe even one of the hawks we see perching on the fence.

I do love our morning walks. Sometimes I get a good workout. I sat down at my laptop and looked up Harry the Horny. I slammed it shut when something about Horny Harry Potter showed up.