How Many Air Miles Does This Dead Fly Have?
September 15th, 2009, 1 Comment »
Flying home from Fredericton, I noticed a dead fly between the two panes of my airplane window:
I wonder how it got there, and how far it’s traveled.
Look What I Pulled Out of the Cat
October 3rd, 2007, 8 Comments »
We have this cat that spends about 40% of her time in our farmhouse. I recently discovered that she had several ticks, grossly engorged with blood, attached to her head and shoulders.
I alerted the cat’s owners–two retired British fellows who live down the street–but they seemed a little prissy on the removal. So, I consulted the Internet, put on some gardening gloves and got to work. The quarter is for scale (it, happily, didn’t come out of the cat), and to instruct my victims of the nationality of their killer:
I was quite pleased with myself–this sort of hands-on-mammals stuff really isn’t my domain of expertise.
There was a little parable in how we went about it, too. For the first tick, one of us held the cat while I tried to pull out the offending insect. There was plenty of drama, as the cat doesn’t like to be held, and I suspect she could tell everybody was tense. So, there were several aborted attempts and she only let us do it once.
The next time, I just walked up to her while she was sleeping and quietly went to work. She let me take out all three without so much as batting a, uh, claw. The lesson, I guess, is that sometimes a haiku beats a sonnet. Or is that too abstract?
A Scorpion in the Bedroom
September 14th, 2007, 10 Comments »
No, I’m not going to talk about anybody’s sexual proclivities.
There was an actual scorpion in our bedroom, about two feet from where I rest my head:
For the average person who dwells below the 49th parallel, this wouldn’t seem particularly unusual. And besides, the thing was tiny-about three-quarters of an inch long. However, this is the first scorpion I’ve seen in real life.
And scorpions are kind of mythic, you know? They’re the stuff of desert adventures and Mortal Kombat. Whenever you see them in pop culture, they’re always vicious, cruel and armed with deadly neurotoxins.
So, it required an inordinate amount of bravery for me to coax this little dude into a cup and take him out back to the garden. I suppose I could have just stepped on him, but that’s probably bad scorpion karma.
UPDATE: I asked a local, and he assured me that these scorpions aren’t dangerous.
The Biggest Bug I’ve Ever Seen
July 13th, 2007, 6 Comments »
We periodically feed this cat who lives a few doors down. She tends to eat and run, so we named her Dine and Dash. Or, if you prefer, Dine ‘n’ Dash.
Yesterdat, I was working upstairs and I heard her downstairs, yowling at the top of her little cat lungs. I eventually went down to see what the fuss was about. She’d returned the feeding favour:
It was an enormous locust or cricket or grasshopper. I don’t know how to tell the difference. But seriously, it was as long as my hand. I could have hired this one out to do stunt work in that Hilary Swank movie. Get a million of these badboys, and you’ve got yourself a plague of Biblical proportion. I searched my memory, and this is probably twice the size of the next biggest insect I’ve ever seen outside of a zoo.
As cat’s will, Dine ‘n’ Dash grew bored with her prey, and didn’t want to eat it or otherwise finish it off. I gently swept it into our dust pan and deposited it on the deck. It walked, with the plodding pace of a war veteran in chronic pain, into the fields beyond our house.