The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Maybe you saw where a gang of killer whales over in Europe launched coordinated attacks on sailboats, the speculation being that a dominant female orca had been injured by some encounter with a ship and was severely traumatized. Traumatized is a nice way of saying she was mightily pissed off. Out there in Mother Nature the birds are dropping rapidly in numbers, the insects are being reduced too and of course the amphibians are thinking about skipping metamorphosis and staying in the water. We humans haven’t been too kind to the creatures who share the planet. A little busy developing combustion engines, clearcutting the Amazon and working to develop artificial intelligence.

Course we homo sapiens aren’t too concerned, not yet anyway. Global warming? Climate change? What, me worry? We got our jet skis and our air conditioners, who cares about a few less mosquitoes, right? If we have to put up dams to keep the Atlantic from flooding Florida, well okay, we’ll put up sea walls and tide gates, not gonna stop burning coal just because a few environmentalists are whining, sure not gonna litter up Arizona with fields of solar arrays. The future will take care of itself, always has, always will. The birds, well, they’re on their own.

But … I just wonder if this gang of killer whales might be a harbinger of nature taking revenge. I watched Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds as a kid, the world under siege by billions of feathered attackers, nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. What if all the insects banded together in massive swarms? Or the frogs formed militias? And the snakes joined them? I know, it sounds paranoid, but dammit, what are those orcas up to? We even gave a few of them nice homes in the swimming pools of SeaWorld and fed them their favorite fish and all we asked was they do a few acrobatics for the paying customers. Geez, talk about ingrates.

I don’t know about you but I plan to keep an eye out down by the garden for any … well, unusual activities by the squirrels or the robins. Yesterday I watched two robins attacking a red squirrel, something I thought was probably normal. Today I’m not so sure.

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