Trump’s Jungle
Yesterday I was wandering the woods without too much direction, nothing particularly new, just meandering along the trails, another animal in its usual habitat. It’s usually fairly quiet around here if you ignore the lawnmowers and weedeaters and leafblowers down the road, but the noise yesterday was coming from a pack of crows screeching about something or other, enough to make me change course and go over to their squawk party.
Up in a Christmas tree we planted as a one foot tree back in the ‘80’s and now was 50 or 60 feet high sat a big fat great horned owl, tufted ears, huge green eyes. The crows were parked on adjoining limbs in the same tree and surrounding ones, all of them croaking and cawing as if the sheer volume of noise would drive that owl out of their territory once and for all. The owl paid absolutely no attention to them. It gazed down at me but wasn’t perturbed in the least by the presence of some earthbound human. Occasionally a crow would make a dive at the intruder, but it was tough navigating the thicket of boughs.
All day that murder of crows kept at it. I kept going back occasionally with a camera and noticed the owl had moved its perch slightly, but otherwise, it sat Buddha-like in that fir which gave it a good vantage on the garden and the open area around it where rabbits and mice might be unfortunate enough to venture. Later, though, I heard the crows fly back into the woods behind the shack so naturally I followed the herd to see where Mr. Owl might have flown.
He was up on a branch in a sugar maple we’d planted 30 years ago, a little too exposed, and the crows were joined by four or five robins plus a couple of hummingbirds and they all took turns making kamikaze dives on this poor owl who tried his best to ignore them. Until they began to hit him. The robins were the worst. They smacked him on the side, on his back, against his head. The owl quit watching me and turned his attention full time to these attackers and it wasn’t long before they drove him up to the woods next to the field and the barn above.
Nobody likes an owl in their vicinity, I guess. When we had chickens, they would go half berserk whenever one sat in a tree above their coop. Crows, they won’t tolerate one. Robins either, apparently. And the hummers, they don’t much like anybody. Owls, well, they sort of made their bed, being the predators they are. Hard to feel sorry for them, really. We got a great horny owl in the White House now. He and the kids feel like the world is against them, they just can’t understand the acrimony or the racket. So unfair! So sad! I suspect in the end we’ll drive that bird to the far field too. It is, after all, a jungle out there….
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Tags: hate on trump, nobody likes a predator