May I introduce the stars of my back yard circus? This scrub jay and squirrel have been entertaining me for the past month with their aerial antics.
Apparently, my boxwood hedge must be the equivalent of an avian buffet. The scrub jay shows up every day to find whatever may have hatched and matured. I suspect most often, he is after spiders.
I wish I could catch his technique on camera. He darts up at that hedge in a short burst and swoops immediately to the ground to pick up any morsels he did not pick off in flight.
But even the jay looks like an amateur acrobat when compared with my new-found squirrel friend. When the camellias start blooming, squirrels the block over show up to eat the buds. The outer limbs of camellias are far to fragile to support a squirrel. But gravity is no bar to squirrels finding food.
This particular squirrel has discovered that he can reach the outer buds by hanging from my telephone line with his back feet. I caught him one day hanging by only one foot. Of course, when the camera came out, he started acting as if an OSHA inspector was prowling nearby.
Back in March, in a comment to one of my posts, I confessed one of my childhood secrets to Babs: When I was in the 7th grade, I wanted to become a veterinarian so I could save up enough money to buy a circus.
For childhood secrets, it does not rank up there with being a junior arsonist or a violin virtuoso. But it has the simple virtue of being true.
My love for animals came at a young age. My brother and I had almost every imaginable creature as pets -- some several times over.
Plus I had curiosity. And this is the darker secret. I toted home several road kill animals and performed autopsies on them in our garage. I think I always imagined myself as the Jonas Salk of quadrupeds.
I never did become a veterinarian -- and my only circus is the one in my back yard. But that is circus enough for me in this moment.
