Dog vs. Cat

My dog always looks at me like she thinks I want to throw her into a wood chipper, while my cat always thinks she's a super spy who wants to trick me with her charming wily ways. Why are my pets so weird?

Baby Ditch Bird #6

Well, our baby Yellow Crested Night Heron isn't a baby any more. It spends it's days and nights outside. It hunts and it flies, though neither of them well. It's been chatting with the other herons in the yard. Most importantly, it finally convinced my wife to like it.

Hunting in a small pond. Very small.

I've been doing pretty much all of the feeding up until the last week or so. Because it's summer and because I get to sleep in a bit, my wife has been feeding the bird in the morning. She takes the food out and calls to it and it flies down from wherever it is in the yard. The swingset, the roof, on top of my truck, it comes gliding in for breakfast. Finally my wife can enjoy a caring relationship with the bird without having to worry about touching it. That makes her happy.
We'll keep feeding the bird twice a day as long as it wants to eat. I acknowledge that by raising the bird and taking it out of it's natural environment I may have altered it's ability to hunt a bit. I have watched it eat bugs out of puddles and off of the lawn, so I know it's learning by itself, but there's not a whole lot of motivation to go hunt frogs when you can just wait for dinner.
We've pretty much done it. We rescue a helpless chick, fed it, raised it, and released it. It's functioning as a wild bird in the same way that a song bird that eats birdseed from a feeder is wild. It gets supplements from humans, but other than that it has to make it's own way in the world. The other day I counted six adolescent herons on my lawn and another four adults in the trees. Keeping Baby Burr alive isn't going to matter much to the bird population in my area, but to the bird, it's the difference between life and death. If there's any lesson to take from the effort that we put into raising this bird it's probably related to that. I don't think that being a stay at home dad is going to have any real impact on the world. Wars will still happen. Taxes will still be paid. College will still be expensive. All of those things would happen if I stayed at home or if I put my kids in daycare. To my kids however, I think the decision to hold them every day for naps when they were babies is significant. I think that making a healthy dinner for them every night is significant. I think being there at 3:00 to pick them up from school and help them understand their homework is significant. I'm not affecting the world, but I am affecting four lives. That's good enough for me.

Baby Ditch Bird #5

Well, the Yellow Crested Night Heron is still with us. I've decided that it's time for it to try and stay outside at night. It can sort of fly a little, it hunts bugs, and it's been consorting with other herons. Add that to the fact that it is a night heron, and they're mostly nocturnal by nature, and it just seems right.
This decision has nothing to do with the birds new mobility. Nothing to do with it wanting to roost on the table right after it eats it's night time snack. Nothing to do with pooping on a stack of mail. Nope, it's just because I feel it's ready to be a bit more wild. Really.

Baby Ditch Bird #4

In the past three and a half weeks, the baby ditch bird has gone from a slightly fuzzy green squishy ball with a beak, to an actual bird. It still sleeps in the house at night and gets it's breakfast and bedtime meal in the kitchen, but other than that it's outside. It's learned to walk in and out of it's cage. It takes walks around the yard and bites at sticks and leaves. When it's time to eat, I call it and it just walks over to eat. Simple, but amazing. I'm starting to have high hopes that it will live long enough to rejoin the rest of the birds in the yard, and there are a LOT of birds in the yard now.
Last week another bird fell out of the nest and survived. It was not unscathed though, and it has what looks like a broken leg. It's bigger than the the baby bird that I have, and won't let you get near it. It's just too big and too far along to try and capture and feed and rehabilitate. I figured it would be dead by the end of the day, two days at the most, and I contemplated finishing it off so it didn't have to suffer. I spent some serious emotional energy contemplating bird murder. I'm glad I didn't though, because amazingly, it's still with us. It can't walk well, standing on only one foot and using it's wings to help, but it makes it way around. During the day we can watch it poke around and preen itself. There must be an adult that's feeding it at night in order for it to be alive still. Even with that, I'm less sure about it's long term chance of survival than of the other bird, and I still worry.
Having more than one bird around posed a bit of a communication problem in the house. I've been calling the bird that I've been raising in the kitchen Baby Bird. It's a descriptive name, and easy to remember, pretty much everything you could want in a name. Of course the name has mutated a bit, as names have a tendency to, and it's I now call it Baby Burr. What of the other bird? We bounced a few terms around like Other Baby Bird, Injured Bird, and Probably Going To Die Bird. We ended up with Hurt Bird. That quickly, almost instantly, mutated into Herbert and that seems to have stuck. So now I have two named birds around, Baby Burr, and Herbert. Just to confuse things further, a bunch of the other birds in the yard have gotten big enough to leave their nests. It's become common to look out the widow and see two or even three adolescent ditch birds standing in the lawn. I have to look carefully to figure out who they are. There are at least nine chicks that are being raised by their parents just in our yard, and several nests in the neighbor's yard. In the next two weeks it's going to look like a ditch bird elementary school out there. We're hoping that Baby Burr will recognize the other birds as his own kind and befriend and learn from them. I'll keep feeding it as long as it wants to eat, but I'm hoping that I'm starting to see the very start of it's independence.

Baby Ditch Bird #3

Raising a wild animal in your house is a little like visiting a foreign country. Talking to the guy working at the gas station isn't like visiting Pakistan. (I'm not being a generalist here, the gas station up the road really is run by a very nice family from Pakistan) You learn about their behaviors, their mannerisms, their sounds and movements, in a way that you can't when you observe them in the wild. When I walk outside I can tell if the ditch birds in the nests are hungry or content just by listening to them. I can see them flip their wings forward in a defensive posture and know that their parent must have just hurled up a treat in the nest and they're boxing out their siblings. I know that they flare their bottom jaw when they're really mad, right before they strike. I also know about how far they can reach. So does the dog. They also show affection with gently bites, very soft, almost playful. They're not super social, but they don't like being alone either. When out of the nest they'll skootch across the lawn to get next to me or the dog or anyone familiar. Between me and the nest though, they always choose the nest, coming out just to eat and then hustling back in to a place of safety. There's no reason to lock or even close the cage that the bird calls home, it won't leave.

Stay

I was discussing that fact with my sister the other day. That little bird won't leave it's nest except to eat, and only then because I don't feed it inside to avoid the mess. This makes sense, if you wander, you fall out of the nest and die. Wandering is bad. I've been taking advantage of this instinct during the day when I need to clean things up or just when I think the bird needs to be outside. I take it out and set it on the cross brace of our swing set and I never have to worry. Twenty minutes? Still there. Two hours? Still there. Five hours? Yup, still there. It will not move. Oh, it sits up and sits down and preens itself and watches the world go by, but it never ever goes any where. This is amazingly convenient and is something that I think we might need to genetically engineer into human children. When they're toddlers we need to give them the instinct to stay in one spot if they're more than about 2 feet off the ground. Then we can build concrete stumps into convenient locations and we won't have to worry about them. Have to use the bathroom? Set them on the stump. Changing room? Stump. Need to talk to the mechanic and not have to worry about anyone falling into the oil change pit? That's why they installed the stump. It would be perfect. Of course, we'd have to figure out some way to guarantee that only a parent could pick them up from the stump, so the plan's not perfect, but it has promise. We'd have to be careful and not accidentally engineer in any traits that we didn't want. Things like feathers and beaks are obvious, but I'm thinking more about chewing. I don't mind preparing mushy food and spoon feeding a baby, but I have to think that masticating a hot dog for your teenager and spitting it on his plate to eat would cancel out that whole stump thing.

Baby Ditch Bird #2

It still looks like it wants to kill me.

Well, the baby ditch bird is still alive. In fact, it's thriving, or at least getting a lot bigger. I feed it four times a day and it gets a chance to eat it's fill every time, which is likely more than it would get to eat if it was battling for food back in the nest. Watching it eat is truly terrifying and confirms any theories that you may have heard about birds being related to dinosaurs. Watch this video of it eating if you want to be scared. It recognizes me and hops out of the cage to eat when it sees a plate of food. When it's done, sometimes it even hops back into the cage, which it recognizes as it's nest. For a test I left the door of the cage open all afternoon and it didn't even try to come out until I showed up with food. It responds to my voice and looks at me when I'm in the kitchen, which is about as much affection as I expect to see from this vile creature. And speaking of vile, the bigger it gets the more it poops. Right out the side of the cage. It's lovely. My life has once again become about preparing special food for scheduled feedings and cleaning up poop. Around the house it's been suggested that this might be a sign that my life's calling is preparing special meals and cleaning up poop. I've checked into it, and I'm not particularly excited about any of the jobs that are described in those terms.
The bird has grown at a truly staggering rate in the last 10 days. It's probably tripled in weight. At this rate it will be as big as a chicken in another 10 days and as big as a turkey 10 days after that. Looking at the size of the adult birds that are still hanging around my yard, there might be a slight flaw in my growth extrapolation. The promising thing is that this rapid growth will hopefully lead to a rapid desire for the baby bird to walk around and become an outside bird. Right now it's working on the basic instinctual premise that if it moves much, it will fall out of the nest. Considering its past, that's probably a valid point, but it's got to get up and move eventually. It needs to learn to walk around, to fly, and to hunt for food. I know I can keep it alive as a baby, but do I have the ability to teach it to be a real functioning member of bird society? I guess we'll see.

Baby Ditch Bird

Adorable? Nope.

A while ago I wrote a brief post about the Yellow Crowned Night Herons that have built a nesting colony in our yard. They moved in and built their nests and pooped on my truck. Charming. Recently egg shells started dropping from their nests, indicating that something must be hatching. We thought we might be seeing movement in the nests, which we pointed out to the kids and all thought was pretty neat. Then, on Friday, we received confirmation that there were indeed chicks that had hatched, and that ditch birds are terrible terrible parents.
The little guy you see in the picture had either fallen, or been pitched out of the nest. Either way, he was laying on the ground thirty feet below his parents and they didn't care. There were other chicks in the nest and they seemed quite content with that. I, however, was not. I just don't have it in me to let a baby anything lay there and die. I just can't. No matter how idiotic it was to pick up the ailing chick and bring it inside, there really wasn't anything else I could do. Just to be clear, the world doesn't need another ditch bird. They're not endangered or threatened or uncommon in any way. Other than being terrible parents, they're doing quite well as a species. In fact, if the baby was pitched out of the nest for being small, I might even be going against natural selection here and be raising a chick that will be a detriment to the species. I still can't just let it die. I am not a smart man.
I may not be smart, but I do know how to raise baby birds. A quick search showed that Yellow Crested Night Herons eat crayfish, frogs, bugs, fish and just about anything aquatic or semi aquatic that they can catch. Ok, meat. They eat it, lug it back to the nest in their bellies and then puke it into the waiting mouths of their chicks. Ok, meat vomit. What very common product looks, and pretty much is, meat vomit? Canned dog food. Think about it for just a second, you know I'm right.
The baby bird is a little older than is ideal for trying to hand raise. It's already imprinted on it's parents, so initially it really just wanted to poke my eyes out. It certainly didn't want me to feed it. I had to hold it's beak and poke little bits of food to the back of it's throat for the first few days. Sounds horrible, my wife says it looks horrible, but it's really not so bad. My older daughter could even do it. By yesterday, which was day four, he was starting to pick up and eat the food by himself. This morning he ate his own breakfast without any help at all. It was pretty awesome. Then he vomited it up, looked at it, and ate it again. I guess I should be twice as happy?
Even though I set out with the intention of saving this bird and raising him until he can go out into the wild by himself, there's no guarantee that it will work. I was quite shocked that he even lived through the first two days. He seems to be doing quite well and is clearly growing, but there is still a lot that can go wrong between now and when he's big enough to be able to fly and hunt for himself. He's the current project around here so I'll be giving updates as things progress. Follow along as I either hand raise a bird that should never be hand raised, or experience a minor family tragedy as the ugliest, orneriest, and newest member of the family fails to make it. Could go either way.

Box Turtle

I was walking around killing time while my son was in preschool last week, and I came upon a mother and her son trying to coax a turtle off of the sidewalk. They were gently nudging it with a stick and it just wasn't working. It was a small box turtle, so I calmly picked it up and showed it to the boy (about 3) and set the turtle back in the woods. They walked away, and I walked away, and it took every ounce of will that I had to not go back and pick the turtle up and put him in my bag and carry him home with me. I was lost in my thoughts about that turtle when, "what's there in the road I'm about to cross?" "Another turtle!" This one got to take a ride. 
I brought him back to the school, and showed him to a couple of the preschool classes, and then took him home. I didn't know that much about box turtles so I got out an old aquarium and put some dirt in it and got him settled in. The problem was that he really didn't calm down. He was going this way and that and generally freaking out. Off to the internet to learn about box turtles. It turns out he's a three toed box turtle, the official reptile of the state of Missouri. It's called a three toed box turtle because they usually only have three toes on their back feet. Pretty cool. This particular type of box turtle lives in the woods and fields of the southeastern U.S. and migrates depending on where it can find the moisture it needs. They're most comfortable if they have a place to burrow in leaf litter and really don't like to be exposed, which is why he was freaking out. I dumped a pile of leaves in with him and within a few moments he was buried and much happier. Through more reading I learned that he was an omnivore, eating worms and slugs and whatever creatures are slower than him, as well as fruits, mushrooms and a variety of plants. They also do best in captivity when kept outside in a pen. Off to the garage I went to get some old fencing and I put a pen up for him in a part of the yard that was shaded and had a lot of leaves on the ground. He wandered around for a bit, decided he couldn't escape, and then burrowed down in a nice little hidey hole. Since then I've been giving him apple slices, which he seems to love every day. He comes out and grabs them and drags them back to the hole to eat. My boys also found a bunch of worms while digging out back this weekend and threw them in to him. If they got close to him, his head would reach out and grab the worm and gobble it down. He's shy, but not shy about eating. 
He's been fun to have around for a few days and I learned a lot that I didn't know about box turtles. One of the things I learned is that wild box turtles do very poorly in captivity over the long term. In the wild they can live for 30 years or more, but seldom make it more than 12 months as pets. Tomorrow I'll load him back into my bag and take him back to the woods where I found him. He seems to be well fed and none the worse for the wear, receiving only an incredible tale to tell his turtle friends. You'd think that at some point I'd outgrow this sort of thing. It doesn't appear that's the case.

Laundry Cat

Really?

Why do cats do this? If I have a basket of dirty laundry, the cat has no interest in at at all. It's like can kryptonite. The moment that I pack the basket with clean clothes, the cat is there. You might think it's because the fresh laundry is warm, and cats like warm things. This ignores the fact that I'm particularly lazy when it comes to folding laundry and it seldom, if ever, makes it out of the dryer while it's still warm. The clothes in the picture had been dry for a full 24 hours before I put them there. 24 hours of dry and it took Schmat 5 minutes to seek them out and lay in them. No easy task with them up on the washing machine and her being 12 years old and not having the same spring in her step that she used to. It's worth it to her though, for some reason it's worth it. Drives me nuts.

Caging the Beast

Dramatic reenactment.

Life with our dog Patty is continuing on it's wobbly course. The latest issue has been at night. She's taken to peeing on the floor every week to 10 days. There's no rhyme or reason to it. She goes outside before bed and whether or not my wife can convince her to actually 'go' has no statistical relationship with what she does at night when she's alone. After the last time we made the decision to get a cage, or a crate as it's become fashionable to call them, to put her in at night. The crate sits in the exact same spot where she sleeps in her bed outside our bedroom door. She sleeps in exactly the same spot, it's just that now she's stuck in that spot instead of being able to roam around and pee in the darkness. For a dog that seems to have some significant learning disabilities she caught on pretty quick to the whole cage thing. The first night she ran upstairs happily. The second night she got half way up before she stopped and wouldn't move. By the third night she wouldn't budge off the chair. You could have baited her with a whole ham and it wouldn't have made a difference. My wife had to carry her to bed that night and every night since. Speaking of whole hams, she won't eat a treat if you put it in the cage with her. She seems to think that any food you give her is tainted with the stench of betrayal and won't touch it. Even ham.
So the cage thing is going ok I suppose and there's only really one part of the whole deal that has been interesting enough to talk about. On the fourth of fifth night everything went fairly normally. We could hear her panting and being weird in the cage but it was storming and she's a pretty weird dog so we didn't think much about it. In the morning she was let out and we went on with our day. In the afternoon I was walking by the cage and I noticed something inside. I quick peek was enough to let me know that I needed paper towels to pick it up. It had clearly been alive, but now it was not. I brought it into the light to take a closer look and figured out that I was holding the partially digested head of a young rabbit. I tried to show it to my wife but she ran away screaming. She said she was glad I was home, otherwise she would have had to just throw away the cage and buy a new one.
That's where we're at with the dog. It's still too early to tell if the long term psychological impact of crating Patty at night will outweigh the benefit of not having pee on the floor. Maybe we'll all get used to it and come to believe that this sort of thing is normal. Maybe.

Ditch Birds

Which itch does the ditch bird itch?

Like crayfish in a blender man, like crayfish in a blender.

We live in a place that is cursed with poor drainage. Along with poor drainage comes crayfish that live in our lawn. Along with the crayfish come the ditch birds. The ditch birds have always been around, but until the last few years, they've mostly spent time in, or near, the ditch. Pretty clever name we came up with for them, isn't it? Two springs ago, a funny thing happened, they moved in. We think it was because of the guineas, they kind of look like slower much less graceful ditch birds. Kind of. We think the guineas are some sort of signal to the ditch birds that they're on safe territory, that this is a good place to nest, so they have. Last year we had 9 nests on our one and a half acres. This year we're down to 7, still a lot. When they became residents we broke out the bird book and properly identified them, it only seemed neighborly. Ditch birds are actually Yellow-crowned Night Herons. They're about as big as a guinea, but skinnier, and amazingly, louder. As their name suggests they're most active at night, wandering around catching crustaceans in the yard. They have a call that is sort of a cross between a monkey strangling a raccoon, or perhaps a raccoon strangling a monkey. It could go either way, but when you're falling asleep it sounds like whatever terrible thing is killing or dying, it's coming for you next. It makes wonderful nightmare material. The birds are mostly harmless aside from their screaming. They have caused a bit of a parking difficulty. Most of my yard is trees. The Yellow-crowned Night Heron nests, rests, and roosts in trees. My truck is parked under trees. To compound the issue, the herons seem mostly incapable of digesting their chosen diet of crayfish. This means that any unlucky hits look more like someone put a crayfish in a blender and poured it on your car than conventional bird poop. It's weird enough that it kind of freaked out the ladies in the car rider line at school yesterday necessitating a wash for my truck today.
 Yellow-crested Night Herons aren't pets, not even stretching the definition to it's limits, they're truly just residents of our yard. In fact, my Wednesday posts are veering dangerously away from 'pets' to 'creatures that live in my yard'. I think it's ok though, even on our small suburban lot, there's a lot of nature to see if you open your eyes and look. I'm continually fascinated by all of the stuff that lives on our little plot of land and love sharing it with the kids.

Roly Poly

A roly poly. Not a great picture, but a really cool creature.

My kids have no fear of bugs. When they were little and a bug would wander through the house, they used to freak out. I was all calm and a super-dad and I showed them there was nothing to be afraid of. I'd pick them up and put them outside to go live their little buggy lives in peace. I'm not sure I thought things all the way through (common theme with my parenting) because now my kids pick up everything and want to talk to them and carry them around. I don't mind bugs, but I don't like them enough for it to be cool to carry them inside and sit down on the couch with them and have a conversation.
Lately the kids have been picking up roly polies, or pill bugs, or whatever other name they have in your part of the world. They're pretty neat. They're easy to catch, and they curl up in a protective ball, and they're harmless, and they're everywhere. I'm expected to be the resident storehouse of information about all things, so when I was asked more about them I had to choose between looking it up, or making it up. The older my kids get, the harder it is to make things up and have them believe me, so I chose to look it up. As it turns out, roly polies are actually woodlice, and woodlice aren't bugs at all. No, woodlice are actually terrestrial crustaceans. That's right, they're land crabs. They breathe through lungs located in their back legs, and they need to be moist to keep breathing through those legs. How weird is that? They primarily eat dead plant matter and are responsible for a huge percentage of the plant recycling that's done on earth. One source estimated that as much as 80% of all plant material makes it's way through a woodlouse at some point. Roly polies are cool.
I'm probably stretching things by including roly polies as a pet post. They're just so neat though, and I had made it through 36 years without really learning about them, I thought I should share. Anyway, my kids pick them up, and talk to them, and bring them in the house, they're practically like kittens. Go flip over a rock in your yard and find a roly poly, a land crab, and pick them up. They're pretty neat.

Dummy Bird - Part 3

In Dummy Bird - Part 1 my dad I and killed a bunch of crows and inherited their babies. In Dummy Bird - Part 2 I raised the little guys on the dresser in my bedroom. I learned a lot about baby birds and gave three of the four birds away to good homes, leaving me the obnoxious and adorable Dummy Bird. It's time to wrap things up.
Other than waking me up at the crack of dawn every damn day, Dummy Bird was a really cool pet. He was very social and always wanted to be out playing with me. Having him out it the house was always a danger because evolution has not given birds the ability to control when they poop. I always had to try and guess how long you had before something stinky happened, sometimes I was right, sometimes I had to clean up. I'd put a towel down on the back of the couch and he'd hop along and mess with my hair and squawk at the cats and have a jolly good time. His real joy was going outside. He loved hopping around on the grass and messing with stuff. Grass, sticks, bugs, flowers, it was all fascinating to him. He was sort of trying to learn how to fly but he mostly hopped and he got around pretty good. When I wanted to go somewhere faster than he hopped, I'd try to get him to sit on my shoulder. In case you're wondering, yes, he pooped on me, I considered it just part of having a crow. He liked my shoulder, but he LOVED to ride on my head. He could see better and it really was his favorite spot. Yes, he pooped on my head too. I washed my hair a lot for a teenage boy. You had to be careful with him during the middle of the day. Being black he absorbed a lot of heat from the sun and could overheat quite quickly, panting crows look weird and he never did figure out how to find shade by himself. He was intelligent, but maybe not smart. I really wanted to take him out and use him to try and pick up girls. If girls liked puppies, they would certainly fall for a crow, right? That idea never came to pass due to the fact that I could never be sure that he'd stay safe. He was always jumping off my head whenever he felt like it and I was sure he'd get hurt. It's probably best that it never happened, even though I thought I'd be the super cool guy with the crow, really I would have been the weird kid covered in bird poop. I didn't think things all the way through.
Click thorough the jump for the ending.

Dummy Bird - Part 2

Last week when I left all of you in suspense at the end of Dummy Bird - Part 1,  I had four naked baby crows living in my bedroom. I learned a lot of respect for crow parents in those first days. Baby crows are hungry all the time. At 17 I didn't realize that really all babies are hungry all the time so this new responsibility took me by surprise. You can't go to the store and buy baby crow food, so we improvised. Under the direct supervision of a veternarian (my parents) we decided that wet cat food would probably contain all of the nutrition that a growing baby crow would need and would be easy for them to swallow. Think about it, adult crows regurgitate food for their chicks, and wet cat food already looks like it's been thrown up by something, why not an adult crow? I'd mix the food with a bit of water to soften it and form it into little balls. With the whole batch of crows pointing their open mouths to the sky I'd place ball after ball in and watch them disappear. After a while they'd start to get bigger and bigger and when they were so full they looked sure to pop they'd settle down and do what all well fed babies do, fall asleep. In a wild crow nest food can be at a premium so the most aggressive chick gets the most food. In my nest, everyone ate all they wanted, and they grew. Oh how they grew.
The baby crows needed to eat every four hours or so during the day. My parents worked, and school was close to home, and they were my crows, so I was voted the man for the job. The only hitch was that back when I was in school, we had a closed campus, which meant I couldn't leave. A quick call from my mom led me to one of the greatest rule breaking triumphs of my high school career. The principal at the time was a guy who took the word 'pal' out of principal. Couple that with my propensity to be at the site, though never the cause, of every major violation during the school year and I was not on friendly terms with him. It brought me no end of joy to drive past him as he guarded the parking lot to bust people trying to sneak out at lunch, and just smile and wave as I drove past. He hated that my mom had given me permission to break his rules for something so incredibly weird as feeding baby crows. How do you even argue against something like that? It's not like you're all of a sudden going to have a bunch of other students leaving to feed their baby crows, and even he didn't want to be the guy responsible for the death of a bunch of baby birds. It was awesome.
Click past the jump to read more about the crows.

Dummy Bird - Part 1

Pour yourself a drink and pull up a chair. I've got a pet story that has all of the great elements. The follies of youth, joy, pain, tragedy, and most importantly, a pet that nobody should have as a pet.
Growing up, I hunted a lot. I seldom ventured afield without my dad. We hunted deer and pheasants in the fall. We hunted rabbits all winter. We hunted turkeys in the spring. The only time we didn't hunt was summer, and then we fished. My dad had grown up hunting just about everything and is quite the woodsman. We spent a lot of time together and he taught me a lot. Even though he knew a lot before I ever showed up, he was still learning every time he went into the woods and that's one of the best things he passed on to me. When he was young there weren't any turkeys in Michigan to hunt, in fact, turkeys were extinct in Michigan by the early 1900's. They were re-introduced in 1954 and the population reached huntable levels by the early 1980's. It's quite a success story. The first year we turkey hunted was in 1988 when I was 12. My dad got some great instruction from some experienced turkey hunters and became quite a great turkey caller and hunter. What does this any of this have to do with pets you might be asking yourself. Well, let me explain in a very round about way. Turkey hunting is a little odd in that you have specific hours that you can hunt them. I'm not sure what they are now, but at the time of this story you had to be done hunting by about 2:00 in the afternoon, which left you with the whole rest of the day to kill time. Part of every turkey callers arsenal is a crow call. By blowing a crow call, you can sometimes 'shock' a tom turkey into gobbling and giving away his location. You can also call crows with it.

Click through to learn how a crow call can lead you down a path that you might never expect.

Spider Migration

Disturbingly, not a big one.

It's spring again, and that means that the spiders are moving. My theory is that they're on some sort of massive migration and they're simply moving through the house rather than living in it. Whatever it is, we see a LOT more spiders this time of year. For a very long time, as the man of the house, I was the sole spider catcher. Yes, that's spider catcher, not spider killer. My migration theory makes is seem kind of mean to kill them, as they're just passing through. I catch them under a cup or a jar and slide a magazine under the whole contraption and move them out. After years of doing this alone, I have finally convinced the kids that it's ok to give it a try. They've gotten quite good at it and I'm usually only called out for the big ones. I'm a proud daddy.
The other day they captured one that was carrying around her egg sack. Somehow my son got it in his head that the right thing to do with it was to keep it and build it a habitat in a jar and take it to school for a class pet. I convinced him that punching air holes in the lid was a bad idea with how tiny baby spiders are. Oddly, his teacher thinks that stuff like this is great, and the spider is living somewhat happily in class now. I can't tell if she's a brilliant educator or just slightly confused about what the word 'spider' actually means. I am interested to hear if the babies hatch though.
Even though it's pet Wednesday on the blog, I certainly don't consider the spiders in our house pets. They're more along the lines of the resident fauna. We coexist with them as peacefully as we can and we've made a slightly uneasy peace with them. In another month or so the spider traffic will calm down considerably as their theorized migration comes to an end, and we'll see very little of them until next spring. That's a really good thing.

Auto Confusion

The actual hand that feeds her. Not a smart dog.

As I mentioned in this post I bought a new car last week. It's working out great for everyone but the dog. She's having some trouble with it. When I brought it home the first time she barked at it, which is to be expected and maybe even applauded. Strange car, protect the house, good dog. I got out of the car and talked to her until she figured out who I was which made her very very happy. She was bouncing around and squealing she was so happy. Then I got back into the car to pull it through the gate at the end of the driveway and she forgot who was in the car. She barked and tried to look all mean, which isn't very mean looking, but at least she tried. She was genuinely shocked to see me get back out of the car that I had gotten into moments before and was all excited that I was home. Again. Throughout the afternoon she would periodically look out the front window to see if my wife had come home (she loves my wife) and would be shocked and alarmed by the new car and bark. She seems to have a horrifyingly short memory.
Over the past few days she has gotten a little better. She no longer barks at the car in the driveway. She clearly doesn't like it, but she doesn't bark. She also only barks at me until I get out of the car now. She seems to have figured out that even though it's a strange car, if I get out of it, then it's an ok strange car. She's not excited about it yet. When she seems my wife turn onto our road she starts jumping and turning somersaults and squealing and turning into a noisy tornado of happiness. That lets me know that it's possible for her to retain a memory for a couple of days at a time, so there's hope, but I'm not sure what it takes to implant that memory. Maybe my wife has to take the car for a drive. That might work.
Writing about my mentally damaged dog reminds me of the best pet writing I've ever read. It's from a blogger named Allie Brosh who is sadly no longer writing. Her writing is part of what encouraged me to start blogging. I realized when I read her work that pretty normal events in life can be knock down funny when told right. I'm not actually funny like her, but I promise you, my stories are funnier than my real life. Here's her three dog stories. If you can read them without wetting yourself, they you're a better man than I.
http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/07/dog.html
http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/11/dogs-dont-understand-basic-concepts.html
http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2011/04/wild-animal-simple-dog-goes-for-joy.html

Pet Hair On The Stair

One of the best things I've ever built is the staircase in our house. It's super strong and the stairs are basically perfect in their rise/run. I'm so proud of them that I'm going to write a whole post about them eventually. In this post I'm going to focus on their one downfall, pet hair.
When I built the stairs I used standard dimensional lumber and ended up with a small gap at the back of each stair. It's only about 1/4 inch, maybe closer to 1/2 at the widest spots. It doesn't affect any quality of the stairs and when I built them I figured that once they were covered with carpet or something it wouldn't matter. Except they haven't been carpeted yet and it sort of matters because all of the stuff that comes off of your feet onto the stairs ends up falling through the cracks. If I swept more then there would be less to fall in the cracks, but I don't. The problem is that the cracks lead to the closet that is under the stairs. This is one of only two closets in the entire house so it's pretty important, everything that goes anywhere has to go here. Anything that has to go anywhere is then subjected to a constant rain of pet hair. It's remarkably unpleasant to get things out of the closet.
I did devise a temporary solution of putting duct tape on the bottom of the cracks to catch all of the hair and not let it fall on things in the closet. This worked quite well and became more of a long term solution. I figured I could just keep this system going by replacing any piece of tape that fell off through time but my wife had other ideas. This is mostly because I was very very slow in replacing the pieces of tape that fell off making it more like not a solution at all most of the time. Today I took the years of subtle (and increasingly not so subtle) hints that I had to so something proper to stop up the cracks and stop the constant rain of pet hair into the closet. $6.00 in wood and two hours of work and I had it all done. I could have probably done it in half the time but I like to be slow an inefficient when I can. By the time I was done I had dealt with so much hair and dust from pulling the remaining duct tape off the cracks that I was in the middle of a fairly substantial allergic attack. A quick shower and some benedryl seem to have taken care of that.
I was going to take a picture of one of the pieces of duct tape that I pulled out of the closet. It's pretty amazing how much hair you can get stuck to a piece of tape if it's in the right spot. My intuition is telling me that my wife would be less than thrilled with me sharing such a fascinating photo on the internet. She's not all that cool with a picture that says "look how disgusting our house is" even if I make it perfectly clear that it's not the whole house that's that hairy, just that one thing. You'll have to use your imagination.
This isn't much of a pet related post now that I read it, but it's what is going on in the life of this stay at home dad.

Raccoons

Let me start off my saying that raccoons are never really pets. Like baby deer, they are wild animals that may decide to live with your for a while. They all grow up, they all get wild, and they all head off to make their own way in the world. With that disclaimer, it's story time.
My parents are veterinarians. One of the odd things about being a vet (and there are a lot of odd things about being a vet) is that any time someone finds a sick/hurt/abandoned animal of any sort, they bring it to the vet. You might think that doesn't sound odd, after all that's what vets do, they fix animals. The odd thing is that people bring these animals there to leave them. If you find a pile of kittens without a mother, bring them to the vet. A flock of ducklings? Bring them to the vet. Baby raccoons? To the vet! People confuse 'veterinarian' with 'home for wayward animals'. Of course most vets are suckers for raising baby things which is why they got into this job in the first place, so as a kid we ended up raising a lot kittens and ducklings and even raccoons. Because of this, I had a fun childhood and I have a lot of stories.
This raccoon story isn't about a raccoon that somebody brought to my parents, though I have a lot of those too, it's about one that I got myself. When I was eighteen I worked for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources for the summer. One day a car showed up at the office with a raccoon. On the roof. The lady was freaked out. It seems that she had parked in the woods to go hiking and when she got back this little guy was waiting for her and wouldn't leave her alone. She didn't want to touch it and it didn't want to leave so she did the most logical thing in her situation. She slowly drove to the DNR to ask them what to do with it. We were part of the Wildlife Division after all.
Nobody there had any idea what to do. except me, of course. By that time I was an old pro at raccoons. we had raised several that had been brought into my parents. This was a young raccoon, a bit over two months old probably, that had clearly been hand raised by a person. When it got to be too much to handle they dropped in in the woods figuring that everything would sort itself out which it sort of did. Being heavily imprinted on people the abandoned raccoon went looking for more people to take care of it. He found a car and just waited for the nice person to show up, which she did. When I got him, he was pretty happy to have found a person would hold and feed him. Probably the DNR should have done something more official with him, but I assured them that I'd taken care of raccoons before and I could do it again. At the end of the day he came home with me.
This story is getting long. So I don't completely fill my front page with a wall of text, I'm putting a jump in here. Click through to read about living with a raccoon.

Snails

When my kids look outside there are a lot of animals they think they want as pets. Squirrels, birds, foxes, bears, snakes, lizards, there's no end to what they think is a good idea to keep in the house. Growing up we had raccoons and crows and hatched turtles and snakes, and recently we had Baby Deer live with us for a while, but I still think that trying to keep wild creatures as pets is a bad idea. I have one exception to that though, snails. Wild snails make great short term pets. In the right season, they're easy to find, they're easy to care for, they're interesting, and they're durable. In the spring you can check under boards that your kids leave laying in the yard or under rocks or any other place that snails might hide during the day. Every now and then you find them in the morning stuck to the side of the house or a car tire if they haven't made it back into hiding before sunrise. Be gentle when you pick them up, you don't want to hurt their foot making them let go of whatever it is they're hanging onto. Snails have to be the easiest wild animal to catch.
Once you've caught your snail, pretty much any container with a lid will work to keep them. We use old peanut butter jars that have been washed well. Put a little dirt in the bottom, a few sticks, and a leaf or two to crawl around on. Add just a bit of water to make it moist and your habitat is done. Feeding is as simple as putting a small piece of cabbage leaf inside the habitat. The leaf stays good for anywhere from 4 days to a week. When it looks bad, change it. A $2 head of cabbage could feed an army of snails for a year. You'd better find a way to eat the rest of it.
That's really all there is to it. The snails crawl around and eat the cabbage and explore the jar and it's really cool to watch. I like to keep the jar in the middle of the kitchen table as a living centerpiece. It's fun to sit down to dinner and watch the snails crawl along. Like all pets, your kids will get sick of the snails. When you have a dog, this sort of thing is a problem. You're sort of stuck with the dog until it gets old and dies or your kids move out and you can pass it on with them. With a snail, you just go out the the back yard and let it go where you found it. It has spent anywhere from a few days to a few months living in the lap of luxury eating as much cabbage as it could stuff down it's little snail throat. Now it can head off back into the wild and tell it's snail friends about the awesome time it had. You're happy, the kids are happy, the snail is happy, and when you want another one, just head out back and flip over a board. Snails rule.