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My dear Algernon beneath his rhubarb
My dog loves her big new yard. One of the main reasons why is how many more encounters with the local wildlife she’s been able to obtain. Some of them aren’t so great. Others prove amusing.
She’s had run-ins with a yellow box turtle wherein she’s been so perplexed by this strange new creature that even the slow reptile was able to escape during her investigations. That’s right: Chihiro spent the whole time of her turtle examination doing what I like to call her investigative dance: legs and shoulders hunched, head darting in and out for a sniff, cautious circles made around the subject under question.
Chihiro was so uncertain as to what to do about this turtle that even he (I named him Albert, no I don’t know why) eventually came out of his shell. He’d of course darted in there at first at my dog’s appearance, but it didn’t take him long to realize she wasn’t going to do anything threatening. He eventually continued on his way and made it beyond Chihiro’s fence barrier, ending her investigation.
I’m not sure why she didn’t know what to do about the turtle. On hikes Chihiro tries to dart after deer dashing through the undergrowth, wanting to embark on a race and fight she’d never win. She’d stand a better chance against a turtle so I’m not sure why she didn’t realize that, though I’m glad she didn’t. Albert never hurt anyone.
Other small invaders to our yard have gotten less uncertain treatments. Chihiro’s always loved toads; she’s never quite seemed to want to kill them. She likes scurrying after them when they hop, and she likes to roll on them as she does all of her favorite toys. However, her ministrations, even if not meant to kill (and I’m honestly not sure about that one way or the other) might prove too violent for the little local toads.
Enter Algernon. He’s a toad that took up residence under my rhubarb, a fact I very much enjoyed as he ate the beetles and other pests that were plaguing it. As soon as Chihiro discovered Algernon, however, she wanted to play too rough with him and I was afraid she’d chase him from our yard. So she’s now banned from going near my rhubarb, though it seems Algernon has moved on of late anyway.
Perhaps Chihiro’s most amusing encounter came this morning, when she found a cicada hanging out in the grass. She’d been munching on the bugs’ crunchy discarded shells all summer long, viewing these discovered treats as a delicacy, but this is the first she’s really seen one in the flesh.
When Chihiro came near the cicada gave a frantic buzzing. Even I was taken aback for the moment, not really sure how a patch of grass could be quite so loud. It was like a siren song to my dog, probably the opposite of what the cicada intended.
Chihiro pounced. She pawed at the ground on which the cicada rested. It buzzed louder, which only encouraged her. She did a version of the investigative dance that I call the frustrated dance. She pawed some more. She flopped on her side and rolled back and forth on top of where I presume the cicada was.
At this point I called her away, not wanting to torture the poor thing. It was probably giving up the ghost anyway, lying despondently on the grass as it was, but that’s no reason to let my unwitting dog harass it so.
I’m sure this is not the last of Chihiro’s yard wildlife encounters.
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