Backlash - follow up to "Death on the Farm"

If it was only this simple to fix.

Wheeuu!  Did I ever get blow-back from the article I wrote about the unfortunate destruction of some wild bird eggs on our property!  (See previous post, if you must).  I heard from friends, relatives, and strangers about how badly they felt after reading it. (I actually was shocked that some of my friends could read).  After the story came out I was lambasted for entangling my wife, the Fetching Mrs. Intrepid Traveler, with these sordid details.  (I heard that from the Fetching Mrs. Intrepid Traveler).  

I went to sleep last night with all this on my mind, and had a terrible nightmare about it.  I woke up in a pool of sweat, choking and struggling to breathe. (OK, this could have been because the cat was sleeping on my face).  But the dream seemed very real.  This is part of what I remember:

In my dream, Al Sharpton was conducting a news event saying he was representing the estate of Humpty Dumpty.  Sharpton said my mis-treatment of the eggs was the continuation of a pattern of mis-treatment that white men have been doing to eggs for hundreds of years.  And he was here to collect reparations.

Then, the Easter Bunny drew a red line around our property and banned us for life from ever getting to dye Easter eggs again.  So, of course if we don’t have boiled eggs to dye this meant that deviled eggs were out of the question.  And apparently the Easter Bunny was also indignant about my preference to bite the ears off of chocolate bunnies.  But that should have been part of another dream.  In a related story, it was announced that I have been banned for life from attending any more White House Easter Egg Rolls.  

Our favorite Chinese food restaurant informed me I can no longer order egg rolls.  “Only fo goo customer”, I was told.

Local villagers stormed the gate of our property carrying pitchforks and Tiki torches (on sale at the Dollar store for .99) in a menacing manner, until another rain storm put out the torch’s flames.  Soggy villagers without their lighted torches, are not nearly as menacing, so they quietly disbursed without incident. 

The Soup Nazi from the old Seinfeld TV show appeared in my dream and knocked me on the forehead with his ladle and said “No Egg Drop Soup for you!”

Woody Woodpecker showed up and pecked the words Baby Killer in the wooden siding of our house. 

A herd of domesticated hogs marched in unison (they seemed to be goose stepping), carrying frying pans like weapons.  They were chanting something about I get no more bacon since I mistreat eggs.  I had no idea there was solidarity there.

You know how PETA protests the wearing of real furs by sending beautiful naked models an event wearing fake furs?  Well that didn’t happen in my dream.  They sent, instead, a naked Rosanne Barr, covered with powdered eggs.  She dared to jump in the lake and rinse off to punish me further.  That would have just been too much.

Then, the Iron Chef stormed into our kitchen with a camera crew, shooting a live TV broadcast.  He immediately berated my culinary skills, and took away our egg whisk.

My nightmare continued when I saw a giant yellowish slimy omelet oozing its way slowly thru my house, like the horror movie, the Blob, absorbing everything it touched.  I escaped only by luring the omelet blob to a nearby IHOP and changing the breakfast special to omelets.

Near the end of the dream, disgraced NBC newsreader Brian Williams appeared.  It was his first broadcast after his suspension for his exaggerated claims while reporting in the Middle East. He said “I have never heard such a horrendous story”, referring to my post.  He went on to say that “it was a shame and tragedy for those eggs to have been wasted”.  He continued with “back when I was inventing the Polio Vaccine I used eggs to propagate the vaccine”. 

And the worst indignation was when the Fetching Mrs. Intrepid Traveler told me “this is why I don’t have your blogsite linked to my blogsite.  I never know what you are going to write and I don’t want ANYONE to know there is a connection between us!”

Lost in all the focus on the wild bird eggs that were destroyed was any concern for the poor fishing worm.  No one seemed to care about his plight.  But the worm had no comment.  After his encounter with the largemouth Bass, he still did not have a head.

Death on the farm.

Death on the farm.

It has been a wet winter and spring this year in South East Texas.  The Farmer’s Almanac nailed it again with their weather forecast.  I don’t know how they do it, but they always seem to get long term weather forecasts right. They say the upcoming summer will be a dry one here.  We shall see.  I believe what they print. If the Farmer’s Almanac ever writes that Global climate change is man caused, then I might finally get on board with that theory. 

Anyway, the small lake on our property has been full to over-flowing for months now from all of the rain we’ve been getting.  It is nice to sit with my wife, the Fetching Mrs. Intrepid Traveler, on the small dock that I built and absorb the simple beauty of the water and surroundings.  She and I have spent many evenings sitting on the dock, chatting about life.

One evening, as she and I were out there, I was casually tossing a lure into the water with my fishing rod.  I never catch anything worth keeping and said so.  She commented that in the nearly six years that we’ve lived at the farm, that she has never fished. I never really thought about that before, but I did not recall her ever doing it. That would not stand.

The very next day I went to the store and bought a tiny package of night crawlers for her to use as bait.  I figured her kind of fishing would be to cast and watch the bobber type of fishing so I rigged up a hook and float for her. I baited the hook with the worm, but that little fellow squirmed around so much that I almost could not do it.  His body was so pliable that I could hardly hold it tight enough to force the barb into it without mashing him flat.  And as soon as the worm realized that it is about to be skewered on to a pointed metal shaft it started thrashing about like it was being electrocuted.  I don’t blame the little fellow. 

My wife and I often anthropomorphize animal behavior by giving human traits to the wild creatures that we live with. We did the same to the night crawler.  We were imagining what it would be like to be that worm.  One minute you are comfortably buried in a lovely moist tub of compost in a tidy Styrofoam home.  Suddenly the roof is pried off, and these giant fingers appear out of nowhere and begin to re-arrange your living room furnishings.  You are rudely grabbed by the belly and jerked right off your couch.  Suddenly you are in the harsh open air and blinding light.  You are being squeezed by those monstrous fleshy fingers.  You vainly thrash about, hoping that somehow you will win your freedom. 

The monster fingers force a hideous spiked object right thru your guts!  What did you do to deserve this?  You were just minding your own business, at home, reading the Worm Street Journal, when your earthworm world was turned upside down.  Ouch!  You would scream for help but don’t have vocal chords.  You’d fight back but don’t have hands, feet or teeth.  How unfair is this fight, anyway?   Even with the giant barbed spike thrust right thru your body you continue to valiantly struggle.  The hook is tethered to a string that is connected to some kind of flexible stick.  What is this, some medieval torture device?  Suddenly you are flung out into space, like being on an amusement park ride.  But you are not amused.  You and the barbed torture mechanism abruptly hit water.  You can’t breathe!  And you can’t get off the hook.  You wonder to yourself can it get any worse than this? ....just as a largemouth bass bites off your head. 

Worms are not the only creatures that have had deadly human encounters because of us recently.  And it is not that my wife and I are bloodthirsty.  Quite the contrary. To paraphrase the worm’s situation, compost happens.  

We’ve tried to encourage more variety of wildlife to visit our property, so last year I built a duck nesting box.  We wanted Wood Ducks to build a nest in it.  I mounted the nesting box on a galvanized pole in about two feet of water on the edge of the lake.  I used the exact specifications provided by Texas Parks and Wildlife for the box. I made it from cedar so it would not rot, and put wire mesh inside it so the baby chicks could crawl out and drop down to the lake water right below the box.

I was checking on the duck box a few weeks ago, and noticed nesting material falling out of the bottom of the box.  That did not make any sense.  I got closer and realized that the bottom board of the cedar box had curled up and popped loose.  All the nesting material was falling out.  Worse yet, I saw eggs floating in the chilly water just below the box.  I counted a dozen eggs that were ruined.  I mentioned at the beginning of this piece that we had been getting a lot of rain lately so it appears that the cedar wood curled up from the moisture, and pulled the trim nails out that I used to build the box with. My poor choice of using too small of nails, meant I was responsible for the death of a dozen baby Wood Ducks.  Damn.  I slowly walked back to the house, dreading giving the news to my wife.

Fast forward to a day ago.  The fetching Mrs. Intrepid Traveler asked me to help her deal with a dead tree that was rotten and was starting to lean over the road near our barn.  It was about the size of a small telephone pole.  It was only being held upright by the branch of another tree.   She figured it would fall right in the road and block her from being able to drive out.  The “tree” was just a dead stump, about 20 ft. tall.  It had no branches since they long ago rotted off.  It was riddled with holes made by birds and other critters who like the high rise lifestyle.  This was the same tree that she spotted a small Screech Owl in last year.

I asked her if the owl was still living in the tree stump.  She said she hadn’t seen him for months.  We started pushing on one side of the tree, when suddenly a large bird flew from the top of it.  It was brown, and I could tell it was a raptor, but since I am not a bird guy I could not accurately identify it. We figured it was probably was the owl.  But now we had made the tree even weaker, so we had no choice but to finish the job. We pushed the tree over and it hit the ground with a big thump.  The stump broke upon impact and the rotten wood burst apart.  In the debris we spotted three small broken bird eggs.  The owl must have built a nest in the tree after all.

So the death toll for birds in the past few weeks is twelve that were my fault and three for the wife.  Both events were unplanned and unwanted.  But both were preventable.  It saddens me to know that we killed a generation of Wood Duck and Screech owls by our ignorance.  Bad humans.  Bad.

I hope the wild life here on the farm does not blame us for these tragic events.  We want to make a good environment for them to prosper.  That goes for the all the critters here; the mammals and birds, all the way down to the lowly worms.  In fact, I would have liked to hear the comments from our friend the night crawler about all of this.  But sadly, he cannot comment because he does not have a head.