Animal anomalies

It wasn’t a chuckle I felt as I slowed down to watch a strange, some­what inert bird squat­ting by the edge of the road. At first I thought it was a quail and let it go at that. I felt pleased that the bird was mak­ing a comeback.

How­ever, a few weeks later my hus­band called the house ask­ing that I come over to the grain bins across the road and look at a bird pick­ing through some grasses on a nearby hillock. I grabbed my binoc­u­lars and bird book. Nei­ther was help­ful as the bird was approach­able and nowhere in Peterson’s Guide did I find this bird.

Later in pass­ing I men­tioned to Mike Oman, a neigh­bor, the bird sight­ing. “Oh,” he said, “That’s a chucker!”

Appar­ently another neigh­bor raises them to work his hunt­ing dogs. They are not indige­nous but rather a Eurasian upland ground bird of the pheas­ant fam­ily. They are just as col­or­ful as the pheas­ant but shorter cou­pled and more like a chicken. Whether it’s the same bird I don’t know, but he showed up again around our feed bin and then flew up on the garage roof once the dog spot­ted him. Haven’t seen him for awhile. Hope he sur­vived the winter.

Another ani­mal anom­aly hap­pened in Mag­netic Springs when Mary Sprague began feed­ing squir­rels stale Oreo cook­ies. Yes, the lit­tle crit­ters take their agile human-like hands, twist the cookie open, and lick the creamy white inside first!

A not so cute scene, though quite nat­ural I’m afraid, is the sight­ing of a bald eagle eat­ing a new born lamb! We love the eagles and must take their affec­tion for meat at face value; would we pre­fer that they stay up north and feast only on salmon, crit­ters we don’t have much of here in Ohio! Well, there are steel-headed salmon in Cleveland’s Rocky River, but we enjoy their pres­ence here on the Scioto where lamb seems a suit­able sub­sti­tute and a price we must pay.

Besides chuck­ers, squir­rels, and eagles we have seen a pair of white swans swim­ming in flooded fields, mink inch­ing along the Ful­ton Creek, a muskrat sun­ning him­self after a del­uge, and even a badger’s den com­plete with an undu­lat­ing over­grown “ground­hog” run­ning toward it. We haven’t seen, how­ever, bear or bob­cats — yet!

Nature keeps our plate full. When you think you are full up of the ordi­nary, some­body dishes another help­ing of the extraordinary.

Sylvia Zim­mer­man is the owner of Ful­ton Creek Jer­sey Cheese in Rich­wood. She holds two grad­u­ate degrees and, when not work­ing on her farm or pur­su­ing her inter­est in sus­tain­able agri­cul­ture, writes her own blog.

Posted by Sylvia Zimmerman on Apr 20 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.