Skip to main content

Rabbits and Wrens


I didn't have 15 of them, to be sure.  But when I looked out the front window after getting dressed this morning, I saw not one, but two rabbits out on the front lawn.  They weren't very large, so I assume they were still young.  But I saw them do something I don't think I've ever seen before: play with each other.  They would run toward each other, and then one would hop over the other, bouncing off its back as it sailed over and while they made a kind of squeaking noise.  It was really quite funny.

After a minute of that, they stopped and went back to eating dandelions, not fresh yellow ones, but old ones that had gone to seed, the kind you used to blow the heads off when you were a kid.  They bit them off at the base, so that the stems were sticking straight out of their mouths like a straw, with the heads at the end.  And then, phwoosh, in they went, nibbled right up--like a person sucking in a spaghetti noodle.  (Not that any of us would have such poor manners as to do a thing like that.)

Then later in the morning I was sitting at a desk reading when I noticed movement outside the bedroom window.  We have a magnolia tree in our yard, with a birdhouse attached to the trunk, where a pair of wrens has built a nest this year.  And a squirrel was trying to make his way up the tree trunk.  I have no idea whether a squirrel would molest a bird nest, or whether it just looked like a good tree to climb, but the parent wren--mother? father? your guess is as good as mine--was not pleased.  This tiny little wren repeatedly dive-bombed the squirrel, which must have been a dozen times it size, darting right at the squirrel's head and then fluttering back out of reach again.  Until it drove the squirrel away.  Quite a display of bravery and parental affection.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

E-mail Wit on a Lazy Sunday Afternoon

It seems as though practically every business where I've ever bought anything in the past decade sends me e-mails about their products, specials, deal-of-the-week, etc.  Normally I delete them immediately, without a second glance. But one this afternoon made me hesitate.  I received a "Walgreens Weekly Ad" e-mail.  Its subject line read as follows: "We can't stop lowering prices." So instead of hitting "delete," I sent a quick reply: "In that case, I think I'll wait and shop next week." I have no idea whether or not that reply will go to a real e-mail address and be read by an actual human being.  But I hope so.

Non capisco!

About once a week I get an e-mail from something called the Italian Cultural Institute in New York.  I don't know why.  I know nothing about them and have no idea how I got on their mailing list.  But I generally take a quick look at the e-mail, because every now and then I see something interesting. The other day I got one of these and saw what appeared to be a potentially interesting lecture today.  It was by a professor named Stefano Jossa, currently at Royal Holloway, the University of London.  He was going to be speaking on his new book, in Italian, but the title of which in English would be The Most Beautiful in the World: Why Love the Italian Language .  It sounded intriguing, it was free, all you had to do was register and get a Zoom link.  So I did. It turned out that the lecture was actually being sponsored not by the Italian Cultural Institute in New York, but rather by the one in Montreal.  But who cares, right?  As long as it's not in French, which didn'

The Blessing and Curse of E-mail

I am, in fact, deeply grateful for e-mail.  It allows me to be in ready contact with colleagues both in this country and abroad, and to pursue opportunities I would otherwise never be able to. But then there are days like today.  My e-mail has been increasingly difficult to keep up with for the last year or so.  But just before supper this evening, I looked at how many e-mails I had written and sent today.  The total: exactly 100.  By now, of course, it's a bit more than that. I spent much of the day trying to reschedule a student trip to Germany that was canceled due to the coronavirus crisis.  We were going to travel over Easter; now we will try it next fall instead.  Probably about half of the e-mails were related to that.  I don't even want to know how many words I wrote today.  If they were a book.... Now it's back to real work, reading the first half of Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther  so that I can put together a mini-lecture for my Humanities students