Wildlife

Spring has sprung

The grass has riz

I wonder where the slugs now is.

            On the walk to and from the mailbox this morning, I saw four in the gravel driveway.  Slugs, that is.  Three were the pukey green ones, the other a pukey green with black blotches.  Two were humongous, like sausages ready to split their skins, and two were smaller—a mere two or three inches long.

            Yesterday’s wildlife view was way more magnificent than slugs.  On a walk at Double Bluff beach at low tide, I watched two bald eagles and wished I had binoculars.  They stood on the sand near the water for a long time.  One suddenly swooped out high above the water and then came diving down for a nice beakful of live fish.  Several times each eagle flew along the beach, perhaps a foot or two above the packed wet sand.

            Last night, Talina (John’s youngest cougar) stalked me as I deposited the trash into the bin beside her cage.  Earlier in the day, a hummingbird flitted outside the dining room window.  I’ve been faithfully disposing of big black ants that wobble across the floor, rather disoriented from the ant poison they have clambered through on their way into the house.  I even smashed a large, sluggish spider hanging out on the floor near the doorway of Mom’s old room.

            I prefer slugs and ants to spiders, and I most definitely prefer eagles to slugs.  Cougars and hummingbirds both delight me from a distance.  It’s the mosquitoes I can live without.