One morning Sam stepped out on the front porch with his .22 in arm; a shot rang out, a coyote skipped across the field, while two kittens sat sphinxlike on the porch steps watching.
“He was well out of range,” Sam said. “Maybe the shots will keep him away.”
Only a few days before we’d seen a couple of coyotes running through the pasture just a few neighbors down. They weren’t small coyotes either. It makes me cautious with the kittens, keeping an eye on them as much as possible, putting them up at night; though they seem wary if they are not pouncing grasshoppers or lizards.
The Pekin ducks are doing well. We’ve seen a few eggs here and there but they never mount to anything. I believe them to be females and so named them Helen and Hilda. They were nearly identical until Helen injured her foot and her web split. She healed rather well though she’s a bit slower and more awkward on land than Hilda.
Once I boiled a duck’s egg. They are quite nutritious, supposedly, but somehow it just didn’t seem right to boil Hilda or Helen’s egg. So, it was the last time.
A pair of Canada geese (don’t say Canadian unless you want to make a Canadian furious) have taken up residence. I can’t quite figure out what they are doing. They graze up near the house and seem to want to make friends as they watch me feed Hilda and Helen. When I holler “pretty birds, pretty birds,” and the ducks come waddling, the geese will move in close but never too close.
One goose has a lame leg and I wonder if that is the reason they stay close. I’m assuming she’s the female. The other I believe to be the male as he acts protective. They graze about the yard and down by the driveway. Most geese stay out at the lake so they are acting somewhat unusual.
I overheard a land surveyor say he had seen more snakes this year than ever. Sam brought home phone pictures of a blown-up rattlesnake. That’s blown-up like a balloon blown-up. Non-water snakes will do that in order to float cross the creek, or any body of water. A neighbor reported a snake in her hallway. She thought it was a common rat snake which some people call “good snakes” but she didn’t want the snake in their hallway so the husband used a broom handle to well … remove the snake. She said that night no one would venture into the bathroom unless the light was on.
I suppose the most interesting sighting was my walking partner who was kayaking the creek and spotted four Black-bellied Whistling ducks on a nest box. She took pictures. Though the Black-bellied Whistling ducks are not common, “Sibley’s Guide to Birds” notes rare sightings of the duck in our neighboring states and along the Mississippi coastline. The Audubon “Field Guide to Birds” describes the ducks as “easily domesticated and are quite tame even in the wild.” Perhaps they will stay.
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