Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Outdoors, surprises slither, soar and even slumber

By SUE CARLTON
Published August 29, 2005

Four women wearing Hello My Name Is badges were walking outside the Tampa Convention Center. Clearly, they were Not From Here.

One was slightly out front, taking tiny steps, staring at the ground in front of her and looking worried. "I just don't know why they have to cross my path," she said, and the others laughed. Lizards, she meant, and that funny summertime habit they have of zipping across the sidewalk right in front of you.

Those of us who have lived here a long time forget what a strange and amazing place this must be to the Not From Here.

Tiny, dinosaur-like creatures skitter around. Huge, prehistoric-looking birds fly overhead. Turtles labor across busy highways. Strangely armored armadillos end up as road kill.

Mostly, it's wondrous. In the alley behind our house live a family of raccoons, and one night I woke to hear them doing an odd sort of howling in the moonlight in the back yard. I'll never forget what it sounded like.

In the morning I walk our dog Fitzgibbons along a sea wall, and we almost always see an osprey perched on a particular pole looking for fish. We pass all kinds of herons, including a white one who always makes grouchy old man noises at the dog. Tiny crabs scramble out of our way to hurl themselves over the wall. Sometimes we see tarpon in the channel, and if we're lucky, a dolphin.

Working my neighbor's lawn are flocks of ibis, those stalky white birds with the strange, ingeniously curved orange beaks they stick deep in the ground, hunting breakfast. They look like a meeting of old science professors, but when they fly, they make a graceful V, wings tipped black underneath.

Not that living here is one big Disney movie. Gators lumber out of borrow pits to snack on house cats. Fat backyard Bufo toads can send a curious dog into a seizure. Some roaches fly. They fly at you.

One morning when my husband was painting our house, he called my name with some urgency. I came outside to see a big black snake twining its way around the bottom rungs of the ladder my husband was perched atop. The snake didn't move any faster for my being there.

That snake became such a frequent visitor to our yard we named him Jake. A friend suggested doing away with him with the business end of a shovel, but no. He's not poisonous, and he eats rodents.

Speaking of which, our sour orange tree is great for making a nice mojo marinade, but unfortunately the fruit rats love it, too. Apparently not content to just eat fruit, they also like to gnaw their way into attics and crawl spaces and eventually, after creepily scritching around a while, die. And that's about as bad as a smell can get.

One night we got home from a movie and opened the back door to let the dog out. She bounded out, and then there was the ugly sound of animal confrontation.

She found a possum, and though she's a pretty citified dog, did what dogs do: grabbed it by the back of the neck with her teeth and shook and shook it until she dropped it, dead.

We got the dog in the house, and my husband got out the shovel to bury the poor possum. We felt badly. We're forever using empty coffee cups to catch giant spiders in the bathroom to release them outside, constantly taking down window screens to free trapped lizards (how come they can get in there but they can't get out?) And now our family was responsible for a possum death, for killing an animal that had done nothing worse than snuffle around the roots of our oak tree.

So he took the shovel, went outside, and the possum was

Gone.

I swear that after the dog dropped it, that animal was completely lifeless, so absolutely, definitely dead he had Xs for eyes, like in the cartoons.

But it turned out he'd just been playing possum, and then he got up and toddled away - apparently better equipped to deal with the bad things that happen in the world than a lot of us.

--Sue Carlton can be reached at carlton@sptimes.com

[Last modified August 29, 2005, 03:00:19]