wildlife can bite me.

Oh yeah, well I have to inject the frog everyday!

That’s my new excuse for not doing anything else unpleasant, for the next two weeks.  “Why do I have to clean the catbox?” Bill will say, and my response will be, “Because I have to inject the frog!”  He can expect this reply to any number of inquiries, including but in no way limited to garbage removal, toilet cleaning, heavy yardwork, and possibly a neck massage.  We’ll see how it goes.

The point here, though, is the frog; its leg is essentially dissolving off of its little green body, see.  And I think there’s a special level of hell reserved for people who buy/find/foster/otherwise acquire pets and then fail to offer them needed medical care, regardless of whether their new job/new baby/new shoes make doing so inconvenient, so when the vet said that Fred needed a mega-course of antibiotics, and that I would have to inject them, I said, “Oh.  Uh, okay.  I’m qualified for that?”  Apparently the answer is yes, although I don’t really have any proof to offer along those lines, other than the fact that three needles in, the frog is still alive and bears no exit wounds.   There are still fourteen needles left, though, so I’m not doing the small animal victory shuffle just yet.

Other run-ins with nature’s children this weekend:

• I watched two male goldfinches barking at each other over who got to sit in my Bradford pear tree.  (On an unrelated note, I have heard more than one person in my life observe that these trees, when in bloom, smell like semen.  I myself do not make this comparison, probably because I have never recoiled during an act of sexual congress and yelled, “WOW that stinks!”  Bradford pears smell like shit, yo.)  The birds seemed unaware or unconcerned by the offending odor, though, and chased each other through its branches, yelling.  They flew to a tree across the street, back to this side to a tree in the neighbor’s yard, and finally one returned, alone, to the Crapford pear.  Questionable victory, that.

• For about a week, there has been a small band of Cedar waxwings skulking around my yard.  Ten of them were clustered in one of the dogwood trees on Saturday, speaking quietly among themselves.   These are some of the most pleasant birds that visit my yard.

• Last week, I drove in the cold and rain to pick up a box that smelled a lot like motor oil, and which contained Isolde and her small-but-growing family.  Saturday, in the warm and sun, I hived them in a lemon yellow box.  Isolde is big and fat and lovely, and her daughters are just as peaceful as Iris’s.  Pictures will be up soonest.

• There are two ridiculously large bumblebees (or very small blimps) that seem to do nothing but hover over/behind my shed, and chase any honeybee that approaches them.  I do not see these two eat, or rest, or enter any cavity, or really do much of anything except hang in the air and fend off the occasional Iris- or Isolde Junior. 

• I watched a brown wasp of some kind hold a tug-of-war contest with a spider of some kind, over a dead bee that one of them had caught.  One would pull, and gain some ground, then the other would dig in and pull back.  This continued for some time, until the wasp came away with the bee’s body, and spider with its head. 

• I found a squirrel tail, minus the squirrel, and another squirrel tail, attached to a very young dead squirrel, along the fence in my backyard.  Except for the blood that had dripped from its mouth, it looked for all the world like it was sleeping, curled up in a little pile of pine needles.   I put both semi-grisly discoveries in a box – because that’s what our species seems to consider the natural response to death – and disposed of them, before Evie could find them.

• We saw an abandoned Canada goose nest, just a scrape of down feathers and four unhatched eggs.  I would’ve liked to keep the eggs, but they were so pretty just sitting in their feathernest that I didn’t consider taking them.

Long week behind, long week ahead.  Photoblog forthcoming.