A Keith County Journal junkie

Yellowlegs! Just as I crossed the state line from Kansas into Nebraska on US 75, I spotted a large gray and white bird with yellow legs standing on a fence post. It seemed shaped like a shorebird. What fun, but what?!

Not again! My copy of John Janovy's A Keith County Journal is nowhere to be found. I must have given it away to someone I like, AGAIN. Since Dr. Janovy's book was published in 1978, I bet I've owned six copies. The only books I've read more times are Little Women, and Ron Hansen's Desperadoes.

A Keith County Journal made me the recycler I am today, and cemented my bird-watching relationship with my mother. It gave me permission to seek the divine through observation of the natural world each and every day. It made me want to pop the Doors' LA Woman in the car tape player.

I can't play a biologist, even on t.v. I can't pretend to be religious, but I savor the experiences that fill me with wonder. I'll never forget nor correctly remember Janovy's chat with God who has appeared in the form of a beautiful blonde driving a Mustang convertible. "I think I'll follow my yellowlegs this year," God tells Janovy.

In that brief exchange the cosmic cycles of migrations, seasons, and tire rotations are set forth in humbling priorities for humankind to ponder. To ponder, and to study the field guide to birds as a daily devotion. To consult the owners manual kept in the glove box as an act of penance. To keep watching for the surprise appearance on a fence post.

© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

Flagrant squirrel

My dad is a bad influence on me. No, he doesn't smoke in the house or bet on the greyhounds. He doesn't squander money on Elvis decanters, or drive around without buckling his seat belt.

At age eighty-four, it's hard to revel in many sins and vices beyond hoarding a huge collection of condiments in the refrigerator. Still, Dad manages to model behaviors that his youngish daughter shouldn't pick up.

Yes. You guessed it. Dad yells at squirrels. Sometimes he slams the windows shut-open-shut to emphasize his disgust with squirrels. And now, I'm embarrassed to admit, I've slammed a door and yelled my displeasure at a squirrel.

True, the squirrel deserved it. I kid you not. The squirrel deserved to be handcuffed and sent up river to the Federal Pen at Leavenworth for tax evasion. The squirrel showed absolutely no remorse and exhibited every indication of being a serial finch feeder criminal. The only good thing I can say about the aforesaid squirrel is that it had no visible tattoos or piercings. I'm betting it used steroid performance-enhancers, though.

Dad has lived in the same house since he bought it with a VA loan in 1958. The house sits on an oversized lot, and if you climbed the hill in the backyard back in 1958 you could look out to the far horizon in three directions. You could watch for the Echo orbiting satellite or the country club's Fourth of July fireworks display without anything obstructing your view.

The tiny pine trees planted on the perimeter of the backyard were about knee-high to a three year-old. Wildlife in the neighborhood consisted of large, plentiful, scary grasshoppers, bagworms on the juniper bushes, and the dogcatcher chasing after our neighbor's runaway springer spaniel.

Dad's backyard looks like a wildlife refuge these days. Peaceful, idyllic, Disneyesque? No. That's just a veneer, an illusion... Dad claims the Squirrel Mafia controls the turf, and barely deigns to let him keep living in the house, even though the mortgage was paid off years ago.

I know next to nothing about Tony, Carmela, and Paulie Walnuts. When I've caught the occasional "Sopranos" rerun on A&E, I've thought Tony looked like one of the very well-fed squirrels in Dad's backyard. A squirrel who wants you to know it will do whatever it wants, whenever it wants, no matter who gets whacked. A squirrel who munches maple tree whirlybirds while it chooses oldies on the jukebox.

This arrogant behavior can unleash a certain level of resentment that plays out as ineffectual yelling and slamming. The resentment is passed along to the next generation.

Back home, this resentment breaks out when a squirrel pillages my thistle seed-filled finch feeder. I come unglued at the squirrel's in-your-face leap from fence to feeder. The invader slurps down the food honestly and legitimately provided for hard-working small business-owning rosy house finches.

I slap the window glass. The squirrel keeps slurping. I open the patio door. The squirrel eyes me with the contempt a gum-chewing eighth-grader extramural star gives the teacher who sponsors the AV club nerds.

I explain in loud and no uncertain terms that the squirrel is an unwanted intruder at the finch feeder with no legal rights or privileges. The squirrel just dares me to do something about it. The Squirrel Mafia already controls both the condo association board of directors and the management company.

© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

Class acts

There are tough jobs I'm grateful someone is able to perform, because I sure wouldn't want to do them. I wouldn't survive a day as a roofer in the summer in Texas. I wouldn't want to fight oil well fires with the late Red Adair. I just don't have the stomach to be in the press corp covering the presidential candidates, especially Hillary. And I really wouldn't want to be the preschool class pet the first week of summer school.

Talk about a tough assignment! For most of this first week of summer school the real class pet rabbit must have wished he was a velveteen rabbit. Being real is a really hard job in the preschool classroom. The new students are split between those who are screaming mimi terrified of the pet, and those who are crazed in their vigorous pursuit and high-volume loving of the bunny.

Somewhere there ought to be a Velveteen Class Pet Rabbit Rest Ranch and Retirement Community (gated) for those bunnies who have so bravely served our nation's preschoolers. I want to know where the candidates stand on improving conditions for elderly preschool pets!

Think on that a bit, then think on this sculpture in the garden of the Philbrook Art Museum in Tulsa. Is he wondering how the tortoise beat him, or the preschooler? "Thinker on a Rock", 1996, by Barry Flanagan, bronze.

My dad has bunny babies in his backyard. They have more to worry about from the neighborhood dogs than from overly enthusiastic three-year-olds. Thought I knew a lot about rabbits, having read Watership Down once. North American cottontails are very different from the Northern Europeans rabbits in that work of fiction.

The Nebraska Game and Parks Commission's Nebraska Wildlife Species website includes this information on eastern cottontails:

A rabbit uses above-ground structures called "fomms" and underground holes such as those of badger, prairie dog and woodchuck for escape and shelter. Fomms are pockets the rabbit creates by trampling down small areas of grass and small shrubs. It uses fomms at night and during daytime rest periods throughout the year, even during the reproductive period. After her litter is born, the female cottontail stays in a fomm near the nest, only visiting her nest at dawn and dusk. The cottontail uses underground holes for emergency escape throughout the year and during winter for shelter.

A rabbit nest is a shallow depression that the female digs and lines with grass and fur. Because the female does not stay at the nest after the litter is born, she covers the young with grass and fur to help protect them from predators while she is away.

The breeding season begins in February in Nebraska. With a gestation period of 28 days and the capability of a female to become pregnant the day after giving birth, litters can be produced on a monthly basis. By late June this efficiency breaks down and the female may not breed for several days or not at all after giving birth. A female cottontail may have five to seven litters of four to five young in one year. Therefore, many rabbits can be produced in a year that has suitable weather for food availability and nest survival. In several studies the number of juvenile cottontails taken by hunters in the fall compared to the number of adult rabbits is 80-85%, which is an indication of very high reproductive rates.

Young rabbits are an easy-to-catch and plentiful food for many predator species from weasels to coyotes to birds of prey, making them a very important part of the food chain. As vegetative habitat dries in the fall, escape cover is reduced and the rabbits become more and more exposed to predators. Many of the young produced each spring and summer are not alive by winter and even fewer are available for breeding the next spring. This is the typical reproductive strategy of such a highly used prey species -- produce large numbers of young quickly to ensure that some will survive to reproduce the next year.

Wild rabbits would probably wish to have the easy life of a classroom bunny. It's a tough job, but somebody has to do it!

© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

Snakes On a Plain

Sometime in the mid-1980's, about the time "Entertainment Tonight", Regis Philbin, Mary Hart, and John Tesh took over the airwaves, I got disgusted with network television. Cable became one long commercial, and PBS became a perpetual pledge drive occasionally interrupted by quality broadcasts. Beta lost the battle with VHS, and the trip to rent videos rarely recouped the aggravation. Finally, the remote husband/channel-surfer became a bad Twin Peaks episode. We won't discuss Howard Stern today, as I'm already feeling as sluggish as a rattler after a prairie dog all-you-can-eat buffet. I tuned out and dropped in, or vice versa.*

Instead of coming home from work and flipping on the tv, I usually take off my shoes, start a load of laundry, check my phone messages and emails. Then I click on a few blog bookmarks. Today I checked in on Prairie Bluestem, and read all about sand adders and other snakes of the Nebraska Sandhills. "Sand adders" calls up an image of an ancient toga-clad mathematician walking down the beach writing geometric proofs with a long stick.

Much as I would like to dilly-dally wondering if Peabody, Sherman, and Captain Peachfuzz ever met this particular sand adder back when tv was worth watching, I must find out about the Chaldean astrologers. A Chaldean was a member of an ancient Semitic people who ruled in Babylonia ... a person versed in occult learning; an astrologer, soothsayer, or sorcerer, according to my precious American Heritage Dictionary. The root word may have a relation to the word caldron, mentally brewing, bubbling and burping during our Wizard camp. Nebuchadnezzar lurks just off stage, too, because of the upcoming Dallas Opera production of Verdi's Nabucco. Dallas artists Tom Orr and Frances Bagley are designing the set and costumes for this new production in honor of Dallas Opera's fiftieth anniversary.



A Washington Post story informs me that most Iraqi Christians are Chaldeans, Eastern-rite Catholics whose church is autonomous from Rome, with its own liturgy and leadership, but recognizes the authority of the pope. Chaldeans trace their lineage to the Babylonian-Mesopotamian nation of Chaldees, where the patriarch Abraham was born. Did you know that? I didn't!

But then, there is the problem of chalcedony. Chalcedony is much more ancient than any mathematician, even my high school pre-Cal teacher. According to the U.S. Geologic Survey:

Chalcedony is a catch all term that includes many well known varieties of cryptocrystalline quartz gemstones. They are found in all 50 States, in many colors and color combinations, and in sedimentary, igneous, and metamorphic rocks. Chalcedony includes carnelian, sard, plasma, prase, bloodstone, onyx, sardonyx, chrysoprase, thundereggs, agate, flint, chert, jasper, petrified wood, and petrified dinosaur bone just to name a few of the better known varieties.

Because of its abundance, durability, and beauty, chalcedony was, except for sticks, animal skins, bones, plain rocks, and possibly obsidian, the earliest raw material used by humankind. The earliest recorded use of chalcedony was for projectile points, knives, tools, and containers such as cups and bowls. Early man made weapons and tools from many varieties of chalcedony including agate, agatized coral, flint, jasper, and petrified wood.

*Turn on, tune in and drop out.
Timothy Leary
(1920 - 1996)

Wear Corduroy

Those two words constitute my advice to the Democratic presidential candidates going into the New Hampshire primary. Corduroy sends the message that you are dressed warm enough to satisfy your mommy, and you are sensible, thrifty, soft, down-home, honest, and ribbed. Ribbed is close enough to backbone, and to possessing moral fiber for those of us living on Quick Oats, Minute Rice, and Ramen Noodles. Corduroy tells Baby Boomers you have leadership ability. Every Baby Boomers knew a student body president who wore cords and a thrift shop tweed sport coat back in the day. Corduroy pants also tell voters you are hip to Atkins and South Beach. By the end of any day corduroy is relaxed and saggy enough to create the illusion of miraculous weight loss. Now to address our true axis of evil foe--carbohydrates!

The local newspaper quotes former Senator Alan Simpson on Howard Dean after the Iowa caucus:

He looked like a prairie dog on speed.

I didn't see Dr. Dean on tv since I don't watch tv, but I did hear the sound bite on NPR. I was glad he knew the names of so many states. Could he go head to head with Dubya in a geography bee? I'm an old Great Plains gal. I know prairie dogs. I love prairie dogs. Some of my best friends are prairie dogs. My middle son managed to climb into the prairie dog exhibit at the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha in 1987. I was extremely pregnant, and had to climb down into the enclosure to haul Mike out. Many, many prairie dogs were traumatized. Anyway, as fond as I am of the little critters, they don't exhibit presidential attributes, especially if we disclose their methamphetamine addictions.

Now we resuscitate Senator Kerry, who has been diagnosed with "Long Disease" by my coworker. Remember when you could put Silly Putty on the Sunday comics, then stretch the characters? That is what happened to Kerry. I'm pretty sure it happened to him in Nam, and the VA has been remiss in addressing this problem. Have any candidates with Long Disease ever been elected president? Not since four score and seven...

And now on my server webpage I see the headline, "Japan's saves leader joining White Sox." Good God! I tell my youngest, "Japan has invaded Chicago!" Steven calmly explains that there is an apostrophe s. Japan didn't save its leader from becoming a baseball player. We can all breathe easier.

Think I'll go watch "Dr. Strangelove". No fighting in the War Room! Nothing says electable like corduroy.