For some odd reason over the past two days I have been treated with a variety of wildlife amusement around my place of work.
The other day I was out in front of the building, on a break, watching a squirrel in a tree. Some people at my work place have been trying to 'do something' about the squirrel population, mainly because I think a couple of them were running around on a particular Lexus, driving the owner into fits over little claw marks on the roof. So one day I came to work and saw a number of squirrel traps lying around the parking lot. Not nice re-location traps, but the kind filled with poison to kill squirrels, something I think was not very nice.
Regardless, it does not seem to have put a dent in the squirrel population (at least that I can tell) and the squirrels still scamper about doing their squirrelly business. Yesterday I was watching a squirrel on a tree branch, realizing it had something it its mouth. For an absurd moment I thought the squirrel was actually eating a mouse, an idea that was ghoulish enough to make me peer closer. I then realized that what was in its mouth was actually a baby squirrel; all curled up into a tight little ball. The mama squirrel made its way carefully across a tree branch and then stuck the baby squirrel into a tree nest.
I wonder what mama was doing with the baby. Had the baby fallen out and mama had retrieved it? Had their old nest fallen apart so mama built a new one and was moving her babies? Or do squirrels steal babies? When I was a kid we had two cats that had kittens at the same time on opposite sides of the house. One of the cats, for whatever reason, began picking up her kittens, dropping them into the other cats litter, and then taking one of the other cats kittens back to her own pile. Critters do strange things.
On my way home that night I saved a turtle. I was just pulling out of my workplace when I spied out a turtle in the middle of the road. A couple of asshats from the building down the road came zooming along and passed over the turtle, narrowly running him over. Can someone actually not notice a turtle with his head poking out in the middle of the road? Are you so absorbed into yakking into your cell phone that you cannot see what is right in front of them? Meh. Asshats. I pulled my car out and hopped out and grabbed the turtle just when another car came whizzing along, probably to flatten him good. It was a fair-sized soft-shell turtle and he stuck his long pointed snout out and began flapping his legs out in indignity as I picked him up. You have to be careful picking up turtles; those claws can scratch you good. Soft-shell turtles have particularly nasty tempers. I set him down on the other side of the road near a little retention pond he had been making his way towards. He poked his snout out at my curiously as I went back to my car.
Finally, this morning on my way to work I saw a couple of Sand hill Cranes in the middle of a mating dance. Sand hill cranes are big walking birds with a patch of red on their heads. They usually travel in pars or with a third child-crane. I see them wandering about my place of work all the time, however this is the first time I had ever seen their mating dance. It can only be described with the word 'Zany'. They would bow to each other and then bounce around with a comicalness that reminded me of Muppets. I was in my car and slowed down to watch them, but some white collar worker in the car behind me who was eager to get back into the fluorescent lights and safety of his desk beeped his horn at me. I sped up and left the cranes behind.
Lucky cranes.
2026 Update
Dialing back to 2007, where squirrels are being poisoned, turtles are being rescued, and cranes are doing Muppet theater.
Ah, 2007: a simpler time when a man could stop his car to watch two Muppet-bodied crane idiots bow at each other, and the only thing honking behind him was a soul-shaped husk desperate for fluorescent comfort. Nineteen years on, that honk would be accompanied by a high-definition phone recording and a social media post about “traffic due to bird watchers.” The cell phone yakkers Ed so despises have evolved into dashboard gargoyles who text at red lights and act surprised when they hit the turtle they didn't see. Even the squirrels have changed: instead of poison traps in the parking lot, we now have “wildlife management consultants” with funnel traps and branded vests, though the squirrels remain magnificently unimpressed. And the soft-shell turtle? Today it would be “content.” Someone would collect it in a bucket, upload the rescue, and monetize the indignity. Ed enacted his heroism with his hands, no hashtags. Bless him. The cranes, at least, still dance exactly like Muppets, because nature refuses to upgrade to subscription pricing.
“2007 Ed, how many of those poison squirrel traps did you personally stomp into the woods, and did it ever dawn on you that the mama squirrel carrying her baby was just trying to find a safe nest away from your office’s whole “critter management” circus?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2007 Ed: Well, Beelzebubba, I’m not gonna lie and say I personally stomped a whole pile of those poison traps into the woods, because that would be a bald-faced whopper. I might have nudged one or two under a palmetto with my boot when nobody was looking, which probably just confused the squirrels and made the poison guy think he was losing his mind. And no, I did not make the connection about mama squirrel hauling her baby away from the office’s whole “critter management” circus until you just said it. Now I feel like a damn fool. Here I was all enchanted by her careful little rescue mission, and she was probably thinking, “Not over there, kid, there’s death cookies under that Lexus.” Cranes didn’t care, though. They just bounced around like Muppets. Take that, squirrel traps.
