Call of the Wild

Apparently I have become “Nature Girl” these summer months. On my evening walks, I have encountered numerous squirrels (eww), a few bunny rabbits, and what I believe to be the same deer that I have frightened on several occasions. We surprise each other so quickly that I barely have time to react to his bounding away from me. The last time I saw him, we were within 10 feet of each other. It’s quite jarring for both of us – I believe him more than me. (Yes, I am assuming it is a “he.”) I also witnessed a quite disturbing scene the other evening as I watched a vulture dragging a disemboweled possum across the road. Cars were pausing and steering around this monstrosity of Mother Nature’s natural order. I’m surprised I held it together when I saw the insides of that possum trailing behind…

In happier nature news, my tree continues to provide the entertainment of the deep nest. I haven’t seen the babies again, but I’ve seen the mom the last couple of evenings, and I have to be honest: her behavior is disturbing to me. She sits in her deep, deep nest so that I can only see her head peeking out, and she holds her beak open like she is a slack-jawed yokel listening to something she doesn’t understand. I wonder if the other birds chatting from tree to tree are alarming to her – are they speaking a bird dialect she doesn’t understand? Has she smothered her babies in the bottom of her deep, deep nest and now she sits there, beak agape, at the atrocity of what she has done? I don’t know – she didn’t strike me as particularly murderous as I observed her building the nest, so I choose to believe the best of her.

Perhaps strangest of all, a few days ago I noticed some pieces of a tree/bush that is below my balcony, up on my balcony floor. I assumed that the fans from the power generators (you know, those big fan thingy’s) had blown them up to my porch, so I grabbed my broom and swept them away. But the next day, the pile of twigs and branches was there again. It looked like this:

I began to curse my neighbors above (the really LOUD, heavy walkers/runners/leapers) for doing some sort of elaborate tree trimming on their balcony that was falling through the slats of their porch onto mine. But … wait a minute… that doesn’t make sense. So - I looked around for some clue, and when I looked up above my storage door, there I saw it – you’ve guessed by now, haven’t you? – a bird nest. These crazy little finches have built a crazy, messy nest in the corner of my porch. It’s too dark for me to really get a good picture on my camera phone. I just find it amazing that they would choose my porch over all the others when my porch is the one with a human being occupying it more than any other porch in the near vicinity.

I have determined my new name is Snow White. Or Cinderella. You know, whichever one the animals are really drawn to (or in Enchanted, when all the animals come when she sings and they help her clean up that whole apartment and sew a dress.) Hmm. I can sing fairly well, and I am definitely feeling like some sort of princess lately, so maybe, just maybe... I'm going to get some cheap help with my moving out of all this.