Category Archives: Animals

Hummer trap

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Our garage is a hummingbird trap. On at least four occasions hummingbirds have flown into the garage and then been unable to find their way out. The problem is that the garage  ceiling is four or five feet higher than the top of the garage door. The birds fly in and then up. Even with both garage doors open and bright sunlight outside, they never try to get out any other way than by flying up towards the ceiling, where they bump and skitter along the surface.

On three previous occasions we were able to help them escape. One time I turned the ceiling light on so it would fly near it; they are attracted to the light like a moth. I climbed our eight-foot ladder and stood with a towel ready right next to the light, and when the hummer lit on the towel, I gently folded it around the bird. Another time I held a broom up and it lit there. I lowered the broom slowly and brought it to the open the garage door. The hummer flew out.

The third time was distressing. This little bird flew around so frantically that it exhausted itself and fluttered slowly to the floor, where it lay there panting. I scooped it up with a towel and put it on a branch of one of our shrubs next to the drive. It sat there for a while and then flew up into a nearby tree.

Today was the fourth time, at least that we know of. Here it is perched on one of the garage door supports.

The trapped hummingbird

The trapped hummingbird

Our hummers are ruby throated. The ruby throat is not present on this one, so it must be a female. Here is a shot taken at the same time but zoomed out. You can see how high the ceiling is here.

Taking a rest

Taking a rest

The arrow points to the bird taking a rest. This one would fly a circuit around the ceiling a few times and then perch where she is now or on the corresponding point on the other side of the brace. When it lit, it would look up and around like it was trying to figure out why it couldn’t get to the sky.

We tried for a long time to help this bird escape, but every attempt failed. I tried closing the garage doors and turning on the light so it would fly close to it. But it was skittish and wouldn’t come close enough for me to get it. It ignored the broom I held up. I put a feeder on a tall pole and offered it to it, but it wouldn’t light on it.

It’s funny to think about it, but even birds are individuals. One of the hummingbirds that became trapped didn’t seem afraid of me, so it flew close enough for me to grab it. One obligingly lit on a broom so I could take it outside. Another never perched anywhere, so it eventually exhausted itself. Today, the hummingbird avoided me. There seemed to be no way to save this little bird.

I had work to do in the yard, so I came and went through the garage, checking every time I went through. Finally, one time when I looked, it was gone. I looked around on the floor to see if it had tired out and dropped to the floor, but I didn’t see it. I also looked for feathers, since the cats were never far away, but I didn’t see feathers either. We hope it finally flew low enough to notice the open doors and flew out. But we really have no idea what happened to this little bird.

If she made it out OK, I hope she tells here friends to avoid the big open spaces on the front of the house.

On the trail with BD and Jesse

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I got Jesse from the pound in Atlanta in 1979 when I was bumming around after quitting work at the Augusta newspaper (That was the second time; that time it took, and I never went back.) Her cage had a sign identifying her as a Dalmatian named Sugar who was not good with children. She wasn’t a Dalmatian. I think she was mostly some kind of birddog. She was too smart to be a Dalmatian. She was not “Sugar”. There was no way I was going to step outside and scream, “SUGAR!!!” So she became Jesse. And I suspect that it was kids who were not good with her.

She went everywhere with me. When I brought her home to my parents’, she came inside with me, the first dog ever allowed to stay inside my mother’s house. When I decided to go to graduate school at Georgia Tech, a requirement for finding a place to stay was that dogs be allowed.

She was good company, much better, in fact, than any roommate I had while at Tech. Every day when I came home I changed clothes and walked her a couple of blocks to a vacant area where I could let her run free for an hour or so.

I ran too, but it didn’t relieve all the stress.

Graduate school is stressful. My brother, who also got his PhD from Georgia Tech, said several times he thought he just couldn’t take any more, so he went home and started packing. Me, too. Graduate school is like working full time and going to school full time. Coursework means you always take your work home with you, or, most likely, don’t go home until all the work is done.

School was not the only source of stress. I lived about three blocks from I-75. There was a railroad line just behind the houses across the street from where I lived. Jets flew over all the time to Hartsfield or to one of the local airports. The noise was constant: cars, trucks, trains, airplanes. Sometimes I would stand in the driveway and listen, and think, if I don’t get away from this noise I am going to go freaking crazy.

So on some weekends I would drive up to northeast Georgia where there were several places to access the Appalachian Trail. Saturday mornings I would pack my stuff, load Jesse into the car and drive a couple of hours to a trail crossing. I would walk into the woods at a leisurely pace, stop somewhere for lunch, walk on a bit and find a nice, level campsite not too far off the trail. We spent the night and then walked back to the car on Sunday morning. A lot of people consider backpacking a competitive sport. Their goal is miles. My goal was to get away from things for a while, so I almost never went more than six miles or so along the trail.

Jesse probably ran two or three miles for every mile I walked. She was kind of like our current dog Zeke, who runs wild when he’s off the leash. But Jesse was reliable; she always came back. She kept track of me. She would run off ahead of me, and then after a while, come running back to me and take off in the opposite direction. Sometimes she would disappear ahead of me and then show up behind me. She was always orbiting me.

I loved those hikes.

It took me five and a half years to finish at Tech. I went to work in Huntsville, Alabama, in June 1986. I still occasionally went backpacking in Georgia, but it was a considerably longer drive. I don’t think my father ever went hiking with me when I was at Tech, but he did after I graduated. These pictures are from a hike we made in the fall of 1987. My father was 70 years old then. He looked damned good, and he managed the hikes at least as well as I did. All of these pictures are scanned from my old 35 mm slides.

BD at an overlook. Look at the old Army canteen.

BD at an overlook. Look at the old Army canteen.

About “BD”. My brother and I called our father Daddy. Apparently as very small boys we started calling him Pop, but he objected, so he became Daddy from then on. Our mother was Mother, but our father was Daddy. At some time many years ago, we started calling him Big Daddy. I don’t know where it came from, or even exactly when it started. I must have been pretty young. “Big Daddy” became “BD”. Long after we had grown up, if we ever had to write a note to him to leave on the kitchen counter, we addressed it to BD. My brother got him a black baseball cap with BD embroidered in yellow. We still have that cap somewhere.

On the trail

On the trail

Setting up camp

Setting up camp. Jesse is thirsty.

On this particular hike, we lost Jesse for a while. We had been walking when we realized that we hadn’t seen her for a long time. It was odd, because she usually checked in with us every 20 or 30 minutes. So we stopped to wait for her. We called some, but mainly just waited. I was pretty confident that she would find us if she was able to move, because I had already had some experience with her scenting ability.

So we sat and waited. I don’t remember how long it took, but she eventually showed up. She was very tired. I think she might have come back to the trail and somehow decided to go back towards the car. I think she ran all the way back to the car, saw we weren’t there, and then turned around and ran back to us. I don’t know that for sure, but that’s always been what I thought.

Another thing I have thought all these years is that Jesse had caught and killed something. I saw the blood on the side of her face and assumed it was from another animal. It was only recently that I had reason to rethink that. As I posted before, on one of Zeke’s unauthorized, wild romps through the woods, he snagged one of his ears on something and the flopping ear left blood all over the side of his face within the radius of his ear. If you look at Jesse’s face, you can see a similar pattern. Her ears were longer than Zeke’s, so it left a bigger trace. So, after all these years, I finally know that Jesse didn’t kill something, she just snagged her ear. Not that she never killed anything; she was pure hell on possums. But not this time.

Jesse, recovering, with blood from her ear

Jesse, recovering, with blood from her ear

I guess it was not long after this that I took another hike with Jesse. She did her usual wild running, but this time it was different. We were about a mile from the car on our way back on Sunday when she ran up behind me, came around ahead of me and laid down across the trail. The message couldn’t have been clearer: she needed to rest. I sat down and gave her a while to recover. Then I said, “Come on, Jesse, let’s go.” She got up, walked about 20 feet, then laid down again. This time I had to make her get up. We had to get back to the car, and I knew she could rest as long as she wanted once she got into the back seat.

Jesse, at rest

Jesse, at rest

I thought she was tired because she had not been getting as much exercise as she used to, and she was at least eight years old. Now I think she must have already had the cancer that killed her the next year.

When I look at these pictures of Jesse I feel a strong urge to reach out and stroke her knotty head. I would always put my hand on her head and scratch it. Sometimes she closed her eyes when I did that.

I could physically feel her head under my hand for years after she died.

I can still feel it if I try.

Zoe’s dilemma, and ours

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Such a cute little kitty

Such a cute little kitty

I don’t make a secret of the fact that I’m a dog lover, and not so much a cat lover. I think I understand the appeal of cats, and I certainly understand and respect that Leah is far more a cat lover than a dog lover. So I have tried to accommodate, if not welcome our cat overlords.

But Zoe has stressed my accommodative powers, weak as they are, to the limit.

Zoe is affectionate only under very limited circumstances. If he’s hungry, he will purr and rub up against your leg. He looks and sounds oh, so affectionate. So you put his food down, he eats a little, and he walks away. Once you have served your purpose, you are no longer a part of his universe. One time he escaped from my truck at my mother’s house and disappeared for two weeks. I helped Leah search for him, and we eventually found him hiding under a neighbor’s deck. When we took him to my mother’s house, he was absolutely in love with Leah, me and my mother. For a while. And then we fed him.

He lies on the couch with us sometimes as we watch television, but that’s just a coincidence. He was going to lie there anyway. He does not seek out petting or cuddling; in fact, he actively rejects it.

"Your feeble skills are no match for the power of the Dark Side."

“Your feeble skills are no match for the power of the Dark Side.”

So the first problem is that he provides no emotional benefit to Leah, his loving owner. She tries. Oh, yes, she tries. But it does no good. He is just not interested.

The second problem is that he’s a mean cat with the other cats. He bites them and jumps on them and generally gives them a hard time. Based on my observations of some of the other cats, that’s not particularly unusual, but in his case, it seems to be more than purely feline instinct. He seems to pretty much just hate everyone.

The third, and most severe problem, is that he’s mean with Leah. He’s a biter. A few years ago he bit Leah on the arm, and she ended up with an infection severe enough that she had to make daily visits to an urgent care facility for antibiotic injections (in the butt) for a week. She was so sick for the first visit that she had to call a friend to take her to the doctor.

And then, almost a year to the day, Zoe bit her again. This time she ended up in the hospital for IV antibiotics.

And now the fourth problem, the one that precipitated this post: It’s his bathroom habits. It’s not just that he spends all day outside and then comes in to use his litter box. It’s not just that he tracks litter everywhere in the house; I know that’s a problem for many cat owners. It’s not even that he seems to make a circuit of the entire house to make sure there’s litter in every room. The real problem is that he is apparently oblivious to his own excrement once it leaves his body. He steps into the littler box, squats, pees, and then turns around and walks directly through it to leave the box. So he walks around with wet litter on his feet, spreading in throughout the house.

That’s not the worst of it. The worst is that he does the same thing with his poop. Last night, when he came into our bedroom and plopped onto the floor, his hind feed had poop on them. Our bedroom is the only room in the house with carpet, and the only place I walk barefoot. So I (we) walk across a carpet that has cat pee and poop residue on it.

And sometimes he jumps up on our bed to nap. He likes to lie on my side.

I have said to Leah in the past that Zoe is not fit to be an inside cat. It’s not that I don’t like cats. He’s just too mean and too dangerous and too dirty to have inside. I have suggested that she get a good cat, one that will be affectionate and, possibly, hopefully, reasonably competent at using a litter box. Maybe even one that likes to ride in a car with us. But Leah has had Zoe for around 10 years and can’t think of him as anything but the cat she wishes he was. She doesn’t want to just toss him outside, never to come in again.

To be fair, there are some considerations about this. He is on a special diet (no, not human arms) because of his delicate digestive tract. He has to eat canned food, and the other cats would eat it all if we fed him outside. He has to have eyedrops twice a day for his glaucoma, and that’s a two-person job (if one is not a lion tamer) and one most easily accomplished inside on a countertop. With newspaper spread to keep his feet off the countertop. So if we did toss him outside — I mean if we set him free to be the outdoor cat he is truly meant to be — we would probably have to bring him inside sometimes. Under careful supervision, and without access to a litter box.

So that’s out little dilemma.

That’s my view on the subject. Now heeeeere’s Leah!

I will admit that he’s the cat from hell*, but I just can’t toss him out to become an outdoor cat. I really shouldn’t care, I don’t guess, but I do, and I don’t know why. This has been a problem through our marriage, and we wish and hope that we can resolve it. If anyone has any advice, please feel free to give it.

* Mark again. Zoe was found as a tiny kitten wandering in the parking lot at a Piggly Wiggly grocery store. We don’t know who his mother was, but I have often said that his father was the devil.

Fox Family Fare

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We have been feeding the foxes for a while now, as much to save cat food as to help the foxes, we tell ourselves. We have been seeing two, we think, because one of them doesn’t limp. The mama, we think, has the bad front leg. She sometimes puts her weight on it, but holds it up when she walks. Last night, we saw three together. I tried to get a shot of all of them, but only managed to get two.

Two of the three

Two of the three

I had to shoot through the kitchen window, but before I could shoot, I had to take the screen off. We have casement windows, so the screens are on the inside. And then the camera wanted to use the flash, and I was too far from the foxes. In any event, I never got all three in the same shot.

One of these was definitely the crippled fox. We aren’t sure who the other two are. At first I assumed one was the father and the other was the kit, now almost grown, because a neighbor said her critter camera had caught only one kit. We were assuming that only one had survived, but these two looked so similar that now I’m not sure about that. They were more skittish than the mother, who sometimes just watches if we come out onto the front walk when she’s eating.

This explains why it’s taking so much dog food for a little fox. We’re feeding a family.

Another munching turtle

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I took the dogs for a short walk Monday down to a dirt road that leads into the woods at the end of Wildlife Trail, the road* that runs along the side of our property. Not far into the woods we found a turtle having a late breakfast.

Turtles like some mushroom

Turtles like some mushroom

This one was a little skittish. When Zeke approached him, he pulled back into his shell. Zeke is interested in turtles but doesn’t bother them. Zeke moved away and I was hoping the turtle would resume his meal. He didn’t, so we continued on our walk. When we came back 15 minutes or so later, the turtle was gone. But Zeke remembered.

Where is that guy?

Where is that guy?

It’s kind of hard to distinguish the mushroom from the leaves, but this is where we left the turtle. The mushroom almost directly behind Zeke in the middle of the road.Zeke is looking for the turtle. I think Zeke would make a pretty good turtlehound.

Added later:

As you might remember from a previous post, Zeke likes blackberries. He has started sniffing them out on our walks. So he’s also a pretty good berryhound. I don’t think I have ever seen a mix of those two breeds.

* The road is poorly maintained at best. It has deep ruts from runoff and the pavement is crumbling. I hope it stays that way.