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[telophase]

The cardinal is back fighting his rival in the window, as he has been for the past three mornings running. He still knocks off for the day about noon; I'm guessing that the quality of the light is such that the reflection isn't as obvious after that time. Or he just might be scheduled to work another window in the afternoons.

I managed to catch him with the camera-phone as he attacked. He's that vaguely reddish blur.







Poor guy. He fights his little brainless heart out against the rival in the window, but HE NEVER DEFEATS THE OPPONENT! And he keeps fighting his futile battle. There's a metaphor in there somewhere.

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[telophase.livejournal.com]

You should have seen the possum that took up residence in MOm's wellhouse one year recently. Her house is built into a hill, so the front porch is 2 feet off th ground and the back porch is 5 feet off the ground. Mom throws organic trash over the back porch railing to feed the various wildlife (this is outside the city limits, on 13 acres): deer, possums, skunks, raccoons, and the like.

We've got thie wellhouse/storage shed/workshop thing, and there's this big fence around it that we used lo these many years ago when we had a dog, to pen her up when we were gone. The dog has been dead for many years, and the hinges eventually rusted through and the gate fell over.

So. One year this possum mama decided that our wellhouse would be the perfect place to raise her possumlings. (A mama raccoon moved into the upper story - there's a crawlspace-type thing in the top, and she moved in there to have her babies - there's almost nothing cuter than three miniature versions of Mama following her down the roofline and getting scared of climbing down a tree.)

The possum leaves the wellhouse to make the trek over to the back porch by crawling through a hole in the wire fence. This seems fine - it's the shortest route and all that. It was amusing to watch her take a stale, moldy half-a-loaf of bread and try to get it through the hole because she couldn't think of the concept of turning the loaf so the short side was presented to the hole. I think she eventually gnawed on it enough that it fell apart. However, it was almost painful to watch her over the weeks as she grew bigger and bigger and still tried to stuff herself through the hole in the fence. You wanted to shout "EIGHT FEET from you is a GIANT OPEN GAP in the fence! EIGHT FEET!"

She never got so big that she couldn't eventually make it through the gate. I enver saw her babies cling to her back like possums are supposed to do, but I did see her on the back porch, where she'd come and catch bugs on the windows like the raccoons did, looking like any harassed mother of a brood. Her babies didn't want to stay in the pouch and kept poking out a leg or a tail, and she'd have to stop and stuff them back in.

You can always tell when a possum has been on the porch. Nature didn't select for brains, it selected for stench. They be whiffy.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

We had a possum living in our backyard once. We learned this when our Malaysian neighbor informed us that she'd seen a "big mouse" in our backyard-- "You better watch out for your cats."

"Uh, how big was that mouse, Daisy?"

Daisy opens her arms to indicate about two feet. "BIG mouse!"