The Way of All Things

I asked Bow what he thought had happened to the cat. "הוא מת"  --"He died." I asked him why he thought the cat had died. "כל אחד מת" -- "Everybody dies." End of story. For Bow, it's an easy answer, and completely unproblematic.

"But he was so young, Bow!" No answer.

I personally do not know what happened. It could be that Nile found a new home. But let's face it, a lot of the animals I enjoy seeing on my property probably do meet violent ends, long before they ever arrive at old age. It's the way of all things.

I saw a Prairie Kingsnake hidden among the leaves the other day. That was a day after I spotted the black rat snake above my door.

I could not see its head clearly, and I was afraid it might be a venomous snake, like a copperhead, which it somewhat resembles from a distance. So I got a fallen tree branch in order to investigate from a safe distance.

From the shape of the head and the eyes, I could see that it was non-poisonous, and so I left it alone. By the presence of the snakes on my land who eat rodents, mice and voles and even small birds, sometimes, you can tell that there is a lot of dying that happens on my land, as much dying as living. Because in order to eat, one must also kill.

That's not true of everyone, of course. If you are a plant, like my beautiful wondrous red maple, now in the process of turning colors, then you do not kill. You are a producer and rely on the sun. But who wants to be a tree? And even if we wanted to, we could not all be trees.

The butterflies on my land make a living as pollinators. The flowers offer them a fee because they serve as artificial inseminators, which is really a very odd profession to be in. But when there are fewer flowers blooming, you often see the butterflies landing on dead leaves or grass.

Do they die because their time has come? Could their life be prolonged if summer never ended?

A few intrepid flowers are still blooming, refusing to give up the fight.

I continue to spot deer in my front yard. The last time it happened was yesterday, before dinner. 

I saw the little one first. It looked so weak and vulnerable and alone. But I only had to take one step forward, and I saw it was not alone at all.

I wished them well as they took off into the pasture.  But let's face it, I don't know the deer as individuals. I don't know how many have to die at the hands of coyotes and hunters, in order to keep the herd that remains in top health.

Someone suggested that to keep the good snakes close to the house, I should put out a bowl of milk. But I don't feed the wildlife. They feed on each other. And that is what keeps an ecosystem healthy. 

Bow, in his own impenetrable way, may already have learned this lesson from his perch on the rim of the bench, where he studies nature, while remaining a disinterested observer. 

News Items of Note

http://the-cavalry-group.rallycongress.com/18797/stop-captive-primate-safety-act-hr-2920/

Brownie Kills a Snake

Brownie killed a snake in the back yard yesterday. I stood by and let it happen. Normally, I try to save the snakes. I get a stick or some tongs and a tupperware container, and I distract the dogs or put them up and get the snake. Not this time, though.

I was alerted to the presence of the snake by the persistent barking of the dogs. I stopped by in the kitchen and reached for some tongs and a plastic container and went to the backyard. I was expecting to see a black rat snake or a prairie Kingsnake, but when I got there, the snake rearing its head up to attack between the two dogs seemed unfamiliar and unusually aggressive. As the dogs kept up their barking, the snake tried to lunge several times, throwing itself at each of the dogs in turn with great power and an open mouth. They nimbly jumped back every time that happened. I realized that I was not equal to the situation. I would not be able to put this snake into a plastic container without getting bitten.

While Leo kept up an almost incessant yapping, Brownie only barked periodically, getting closer to the snake than Leo ever dared. Then when the snake seemed distracted by the other dog, Brownie would pick it up in the middle, shake it, and then throw it across the yard.

I considered trying to get the dogs in the house, but I was afraid that even if they did obey me, which was doubtful, because they were so excited, distracting Brownie in the middle of the fight might end up getting one or both of the dogs bitten. So I let Brownie proceed. Bow, watching from the safety of the inner pens, was rooting for Brownie.

After several captures, shakes in the air, and body-bitings, the snake was dead. Brownie still wouldn't let me touch it until hours later. I thought maybe he wanted to eat it, but it was intact when I finally took it away and discarded its limp body in the thicket of the pasture.

My friend tells me it was just a harmless bullsnake, and that if it had been a venomous snake Brownie would be dead now. But I did the best I could under the circumstances, and Brownie did not get bitten once during the encounter. He was actually very careful and meticulous about his work, attacking the snake only when it was distracted and not allowing the head to make contact with him during the struggle. After the kill, Brownie kept the snake to himself, holding it in the middle and shaking its limp body. He would not allow me to touch it until he was absolutely sure that the danger had passed.

Snake Season Begins

With the weather warming up, it is snake season again.Yesterday on my walk I met a black rat snake. Snakes are much slower than rabbits, so this one stayed very still.

He was sunning himself out by the well house, and when I came in closer to look, he flicked his tongue in and out.

Here is a different view of the snake from the other side, so you can see the length of its body.

I left the snake unmolested, since he is guarding my well house from mice. But if for any reason he ventures into the back yard where the dogs are, he is unlikely to survive. Let's hope he is smart enough not to try that. Leo is already quite agitated by squirrel sightings.

This morning Bow and I went outside into the outer pen, and I brought along the watering can. But Bow refused to use it, so I had to water the seeds by myself.

In the interest of full disclosure, I think I should tell you that Bow knocked over the planter once yesterday, and all the dirt spilled out on the floor of the pen. I scolded him for it, and he has not done it again, but I have a lot of doubt as to the outcome  for those seeds. I picked up everything I could and put it back in the planter. This morning I saw that one of the pea seeds had moved up to the surface and was trying to germinate. I pushed it down a little, so it would have a dirt covering.

Bow seems to be against the idea of gardening. He knows all about it, for when he was much younger and not yet in the pens, we did have a flower garden up front. We all took turns watering the plants, and even children who came to visit enjoyed doing that. But not Bow.

It would be nice if Bow would cooperate just a little in earning his own keep or growing his own food. But he has to want to first.

Warm Enough for Snakes

Today is a beautiful day. Bow has been out in the sunshine on and off all day. He really loves sunlight, even when it is not that warm. But today was warm enough.

In fact, it was warm enough to wake the snakes. I found this black ratter in the woodpile in the garage. Fortunately, the snake was still half asleep from the long cold spell, and it was not a long way to transport him to the outside.

The snake was awake, but not very active when I left him out there.

He still had his tail curled around the stick I had used to transport him outside. I showed Bow the footage of the snake, but he was not impressed.

He just wanted to go back outside.

After all, playing with the dogs is much more fun than looking at a video of a sleepy snake.

The Tupperware Problem and the Thanksgiving Snake

Thanksgiving is a time of abundance. We prepare more than enough food, but it's okay, because the leftovers last for several days.

There is the turkey and the pumpkin pie, the stuffing and the yams, and the cranberry sauce.

We eat until we are stuffed, and still there is plenty left over. This year, even Bow realized he did not need to finish it all in one sitting. He did not really work that hard on the turkey and the stuffing, focusing more on the cranberry sauce and the sparkling red grape juice.

When everybody has had their fill and they are just too sleepy and tuckered out for any more digestive effort, that is when we break out the Tupperware. I have to dig deep to try to find the covers to all the containers, so that everything is properly put away, ready to be eaten slowly over the next week. 

Invariably, some containers are found for which there are no covers, and some covers are found for which there is no container. Nevertheless, I managed to put everything away last night, with only a few mismatched items of Tupperware remaining, when I spotted that ribbon in the hallway that seemed out of place. 

I think I actually walked over it first, then did a double take. Not a ribbon. A snake!

Of course, what I normally do when I find a snake I need to transport from one location to another is to break out the Tupperware. I usually look for a container that will easily accommodate that particular snake. But this was Thanksgiving! All my really good Tupperware was in use and filled to the brim with goodies. I had just put everything away in the refrigerator! The only thing left were the badly mismatched containers and lids. And here was this snake!

By the time I grabbed the best container and lid I could find, the Thanksgiving snake was already making plans to escape my clutches. But I had my mother and daughter to think of, neither of whom are particularly fond of snakes.

I had to capture the snake and transport him outside before he hid somewhere in the house, only to emerge at the worst possible moment. So I pushed him with my badly chosen rectangular lid into the the circcular opening of the container I had and gingerly held the lid over the container.

I don't have pictures of this, but at one point the snake's tail was hanging outside the container while the head and majority of his body were inside. Luckily, he decided to cooperate and tucked his tail into the container, accommodating himself to its shape, so that I could press the mismatched lid firmly onto the container.

Then I transported him outside and a little way from the house. When I removed the lid, he seemed happy to escape into the night.

Any other time of the year, I have plenty of Tupperware for snakes. But on Thanksgiving day, there is only that mismatched Tupperware left. Luckily, the snake was understanding, and he cooperated even when my containers were not absolutely right for the task. That is something to be thankful for!

Empathy, Literacy and the Full Moon

Last night was the night of the Strawberry  Moon. No, I did not get a good picture of it with my cell phone camera. So I will leave that to your imagination -- or you could check the blog of somebody who has a real camera.

But I did have some interesting experiences, possibly due to the full moon, and also a few thoughts to share.

Yesterday I ran across an article in the Atlantic about how literacy improves empathy. It was full of platitudes: reading about another person's experiences in a literary work (as opposed to say, low brow lit) improves our ability to empathize with others, according to the article. Then they gave some reasons why they think that, among them: literacy is something that has to be taught. Because it's unnatural, it makes us think more. And thinking leads to empathy, and so we are getting better and better, and are more empathetic than pre-literate people.

If you have connections, you can write anything in a prestigious journal and get it published. But really! That argument is full of holes. First of all, literacy does not have to be taught, any more than language has to be taught. It can be picked up, but it requires exposure. Like language itself, literacy is something few people would come up with on their own, because most do not invent their own language or their own alphabet. But with exposure in a social setting, we pick up the ambient language. And many children, including Bow, have also picked up the ability to read, without explicit instruction. Literacy happens when people who are pre-wired to decode are exposed to writing and language in a social setting.

Secondly, high literature predates writing. Many great classical works of literature, including parts of the Old Testament and the Iliad, existed as oral tradition before they were ever set down in writing. Writing does not beget literature. It merely helps to preserve it. And empathy, if we have any, is something we bring to literature: not something we gain from reading it. People without empathy can't get it out of a book.

Take Bow, for instance. He has empathy, because he can feel what another person feels without getting under their skin. He brings this empathy to bear every time he grooms me.

Bow has surgical instruments at his fingertips, and yet his touch when he examines me is soft and gentle. He can remove a mole with a single flick of a finger, and yet he examines each blemish on the surface of my skin with care. Like a doctor, he examines ears, eyes and nose to determine any signs of ill health or disease. But unlike most of today's doctors, he does it without asking for a fee.

Can empathy be taught? I don't think so. No more than literacy can be. It can be demonstrated,  but we cannot expect to teach it to an unwilling and unmindful pupil. My experience is the same with readers of my books. You can take them on the journey, but they will not suffer along with the characters, if their mind is closed.  To feel for another, you have to have feelings for yourself. Today, many humans have shut themselves down. They are blind  to the sights that surround them, and they feel nothing that they have not somehow been given permission to feel by the society they live in.

Walking alone yesterday evening, I stayed open to the world around me. A snake was lying across my path, so I stepped aside and walked around it. But then curiosity got the better of me, and I turned back and tried to film it. The snake, wanting to avoid a confrontation, seeing that I was not leaving, decided to go back into the overgrown pasture.

It was an eastern yellow-bellied racer, a friend later told me on Facebook. Racer is a good name for it, as once it made up its mind to leave, it wasted no time in executing that decision.

I peered into the pasture, where I spotted a beautiful flower, which a Facebook friend later identified as common milkweed.

I continued along my path all the way to the western edge of my property, then headed back. On the way back, I came across a turtle. The turtle, being slow, allowed me to take more time to observe it.

There was exposed dirt where the turtle's hind quarters were moving, and at first I thought it was trying to dig its way out of the shallow hole it was in.

But when I shared the footage I got of the turtle with a Facebook friend, she told me it was female three-toed box turtle who was digging a nest to lay her eggs in.

I left her alone, thinking that whatever she was up to, she did not need my help to do it.

 My friend says that seeing a female box turtle dig a nest in the wild is quite rare, because they usually do this in private where no one can see. But it was the evening of the strawberry moon, and the animals were coming out. I was glad I was there to see it.

Does empathy come from a book? I don't think so. Empathy means being able to feel for others, even those quite different from us. Empathy prepares people to understand what they read. It makes us better readers and better people.  But empathy is not found between the pages of a book. It is found within us -- or not at all.

The Cycle of Life

Cherry picking season is over. I wrote about that this morning in The Feast Before Us. No more cherries. But that's okay, because there are other kinds of fruit ripening. It's part of the cycle of life, that every fruit has its season. Each comes into our lives when its time is ripe, and so we don't run out of fruit all at once. It seems almost as if nature intended it that way, and it's a part of the cycle I am happy to go along with.

There are other aspects of the cycle of life, however, that most of us find a little more disturbing.  If you are squeamish, you may want to skip the rest of this post, because it's about life and death and eating and getting eaten. It's not the peaceful realm of botany, my friends.

Today after lunch, Bow wanted to go outside, and he settled happily on the bench to chew his cud. I snapped some pictures.

Bow sometimes hides his mouth when he's chewing, as a mark of politeness, I suppose.But he was happy and content, and when I asked him to let me take a better picture, he obliged.

The two outdoor dogs, Leo and Brownie, were also lounging peacefully outside. Bow and Leo are good friends, and Leo likes to sit in a wrought iron chair right next to the part of the pen where Bow's bench is.

Leo has a brand new red collar that Sword gave him, of which he is very proud. He likes showing it off. Brownie was also hanging out close by.

All of a sudden, the dogs started barking and raced toward the south fence of the yard. Bow became very animated, too. I left the outer pens to go investigate. I asked Bow if he wanted to go inside, but he preferred to stay there and to display in the direction of where the dogs were barking.

I didn't see anything in the yard through the bars of the pens, so I assumed that the things that had everybody so excited was on the other side of the fence. But when I went to the front yard to investigate, there was not much to see. So I snapped some pictures of wildflowers, thinking it was a false alarm.

But the dogs kept barking excitedly and Bow kept displaying, so I went in to check what was going on in the back yard. When I approached Brownie, the mystery was immediately cleared up. He had the severed head of snake dangling out of his mouth.

He kept tossing it up in the air and then catching it and then shaking it around. I noticed that there was still some movement in the snake head part of the snake, even though it should have already been dead.

On the ground, a little way away, I found the other half of the snake. Or rather, it was the longer and hindmost of the two parts. It looked odd to me, as part of it didn't seem like a snake at all.

I knelt to examine it. There was a half digested bird, legs first, sticking out of the snake's belly. I was curious to see the bird a little better, so I picked up the remains of the snake by its tail. For a moment, the bird dangled out of it.

Then it fell to the ground. But the bird that landed on the ground near the headless snake corpse had no head itself. It was a headless dead bird, lying next the headless dead snake that had devoured it.

And there in a nutshell is the other, scarier, more troubling part of the cycle of life. We can feel compassion for the bird that was swallowed by the snake. We can feel compassion for the snake that was killed by the dog. And we can feel the excitement of the dog, who, even though he has more than enough to eat, still enjoys hunting.

Bow and I can feel for every living creature in turn. But we can't identify with all of them at once. That would be impossible. From his vantage point in the outer pen, Bow could see all of this. When the dogs calmed down, so did Bow.

I disposed of the bodies of the bird and the snake, then I went back to check on Bow. Was he upset? Had he been traumatized by the sight of so much killing? No. He was calm and happy, lying on the bench, chewing his cud. All was right with the world.

Just Another Snake

The long winter is finally over. And we have gone straight to summer. On May 14. when I gave my talk at the Dent County Historical Society, the temperature outside was around ninety. Yesterday, at Orchard House I spotted flowers in full bloom that should have waited a while to get there.

And today in the pen, snake season officially began. It was really just such a small snake that Bow was not even concerned about it.

I went outside into the back yard to look at the snake from the other direction, and as I came up, Bow was trying to touch it. I asked him not to.

I went to get some tongs and a container to put the snake in, so that I could transport it further away from the house, where neither Bow nor the dogs would bother it. But when I started to move the snake, the dogs wanted to take it away from me, and I had to tell them "no!" several times, before I had the snake tucked safely away in the container.

I took the snake out into the field and released it. It may come back later, but in the meantime it can hunt rodents unmolested by our dogs.

Brownie Kills a Snake

Today, a little before lunch, we heard the dogs barking in the back yard. I asked Bow if it would be all right for me to go see what was happening, and he agreed. By the time I got out there, Brownie had caught the snake and was holding it in his mouth, shaking it, dropping it, and then picking it up again and repeating the process. When I first arrived on the scene the snake was alive, but injured. By the time Brownie allowed me to take it from him, it was dead.

Bow had watched all this through the windows of the inner pen. If you listen carefully, you can even hear him vocalize.

Once the snake was dead, I took a photo of it, took it in to show to Bow, and then disposed of it by throwing it out in the field close to our house.

Then I went back in the pen with Bow and showed him the footage I had shot. After seeing the snake killed again in the video, Bow went into a short display. When I reminded him the snake was already dead, he calmed down at once.

I realized afterward that the picture I had shot of the dead snake was not very clear, so after lunch I retrieved it momentarily from the field to try to get better pictures. There were already ants all over it by then. I used a towel as a background for the shot, because it made the markings stand out better.

What kind of snake do you think this is? Here is an article about snakes at the Missouri Department of Conservation site:

http://mdc.mo.gov/discover-nature/common-plants-and-animals/amphibians-and-reptiles/snakes

The Snake I Caught

"There's a snake in my room!" Sword announced this afternoon.
When something like this happens, I leave the pens right away, without even asking leave of Bow.
Sure enough there really was a snake in her room. I went to the kitchen to get some paraphernalia to catch it with, and it was still there when I got back.  I managed to pin it down with a spatula, but then it escaped head first into a hole in the wall, with the rest of it trailing after. I had to pull it out by the tail, but when it was all the way out of the hole, I prevented it from turning back on me by pinning it down with the spatula and getting it sandwiched in some kitchenware.

 Then I took it outside to the field to let it go. But it was very reluctant to go anywhere for a long time. I think I must have traumatized it.

Afterwards, I returned to the pen. "I want a snake," Bow spelled.
"I let him go," I replied.
"Don't let him go," he spelled.