On natural cycles (sermon -- potentially offensive content)

[jhetley]

Mentioning that part about juicy bits thawing out of snowbanks may have squicked some readers.  The nature center is a wildlife refuge for environmental education, but they don't make any attempt at neatness and Bambi pictures.  They have a couple of winter-killed deer lying about on the blood-stained snow right now, and the bones get rearranged by coyotes and ravens on a regular basis.

This brings us to the morning sermonette.  Some people seem to believe that if bloodthirsty old hunters don't shoot Bambi, the little tyke will live forever.  Sorry.  Ain't true.  Bambi will, within a rather short time (in human terms) either starve from lack of forage in a harsh winter or die a savage death at the teeth of something mean and nasty.  Coyotes aren't tidy hunters, with Federal laws in place about humane slaughter.  They'll usually hamstring their prey or drive it into deep snow and start feeding while it's still alive...

Bambi dies, folks.  Life isn't Disney.

Comments

[wcg.livejournal.com]

Life is Godzilla.

[quilzas.livejournal.com]

Love the icon!

[quilzas.livejournal.com]

Dead things are tasty!

[edschweppe.livejournal.com]

Depends on the dead thing. (For example, the dead leaves blowing around my doorway are not what I'd call appetizing. Neither are the mashed squirrels that are starting to show up in the middle of the road.)

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Different tastes for different critters. Lots of worms and slugs and arthropods really get off on your dead leaves. And I suspect that the crows have their beady little eyes on every one of your mashed squirrels.

[otterdance.livejournal.com]

I grew up on venison. There are still plenty of Bambi's out there. "Folks from away" don't usually know that hunting is a controlled harvest. And they really, really don't get it when they announce tearfully that they hit a Bambi, and someone like me asks, "Did ya keep it?"

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Well, depends on how badly you messed up the roadkill -- not much usable meat left after a highway-speed impact with an F-150...

[otterdance.livejournal.com]

Ayuh, but the rest of 'er is some tendah!

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

When I was a kid, I used to go up to my grandmother's cabins in far north Michigan during the summer, and I regularly ran across animals that had frozen to death during the winter while tromping through the woods. Most telling were the deer: I came across several where the skeleton was still held together with mummified ligaments and skin, suggesting that the deer died early on and the corpse was preserved for a time due to freeze-drying. My sister tried to claim that these were deer killed by hunters who were too lazy to track down their quarry, but you never actually saw any signs of violence on the corpses, other than work by small scavengers such as squirrels and mice. The wolves were gone, the wolverines were never in the Lower Peninsula, and the foxes were way too small to take down a doe or even a fawn, and these deer died because no rational person goes outside during a January blizzard in far north Michigan.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Back when we lived in Michigan, massive numbers of deer starved each winter. Drive up the highway and you could see a browse line in the forest like someone had run a power hedge-trimmer 8' off the ground. One April, Wife and I went for a short hike in Hartwick Pines -- found six dead deer in maybe half an hour's walk.

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

That sounds familiar. Outside of Lansing, where I was born, we had to worry about the dwarf apple trees in our back yard being torn down by deer or girdled by rabbits. To paraphrase from Robert Silverberg, sightings of Bambi set off my salivary glands instead of my adrenals.

[maribou]

I recently was out walking and came across a group of people staring transfixedly at a hawk. So, I stared it a bit myself. One lady said to me, "It's a hawk!" I said, "Yup. You know, sometimes if you're walking down on the actual creek bank, they'll follow you for a mile or so." And the lady got the soft mushy look in her eyes and said, "*REALLY*???" And I said, "Mm. I think maybe it's because the little mice and birds and whatever that you stir up, walking through the brush, are easy pickings." And she looked absolutely horrified. Eh heh heh heh.

Seriously, people like that bother me. Either love the hawk or don't love the hawk, but don't romanticize the hawk to the point where a reminder that it eats small critters is Terrible and Horrifying.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Some of the more ... amusing calls that Wife fields at the nature center go, "How can I scare off a nasty hawk that's hanging around my bird feeder?"

Umm. Lady, it's a _bird_. It's _feeding_.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Lady, it's a _bird_. It's _feeding_.

Oh, good one! I like that response.

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

I have a hard time imagining that anyone who reads your journal would be squicked out by a mention of the Cycle of Life.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

I'd like to think you are right, but some young innocents may have been lured in by the "YA" reviews on my books. Which make me nervous...

[edschweppe.livejournal.com]

Bambi grew up to be a Marine. It's the rest of the deer that aren't so lucky.