Category Archives: Nature

The peepers have ceased their peeping, but now through the upstairs window at night we hear the croak of myriad bullfrogs down in the swamp. Gil said that they had polished off the peepers, and could even manage a meal of mice. I refused to believe a frog could eat a mouse.

But it’s true. Sometimes half a foot long, the bullfrog stalks its prey, rotating its thickset body toward it and taking muscular leaps forward, then executing a ballistic lunge (eyes closed all the while) and extending its elastic mucous-coated tongue to engulf its meal. What it can’t pull into its mouth with its tongue it stuffs in with its forearms.

“You never see a frog so modest and straightforward as he was, for all he was so gifted.” (Mark Twain)

Yes, mice do make a meal. Investigations of frog stomachs have also revealed small turtles, birds, snakes and bats.

Even another bullfrog will do.

The immature Hobbit garden:

The immature Oliver:

Another turtle today scuttling, scuttling across the rough soil of the Hobbit garden (as yet unplanted). They scoot away surprisingly fast, as if they have important business elsewhere.

The camouflaged nest lies undisturbed. Surprisingly to me, a turtle wound up in exactly the same spot last year and we picked her up and moved her down to the swamp, assuming she had gotten turned around and needed to go home. Of course she was anything but turned around; from my one minute of research into painted turtle incubation habits I find that females build their nests in the same spot year after year. So we merely fouled up her plans when we sent her back to the swamp.

This year she got luckier.

It will take something like 72 days for her eggs to hatch. Then the hatchlings will winter underground in that compact pit of a nest until the warm weather returns, when they will start the sunbathing-on-a-rock regimen for which I love them (and which keeps them alive, by regulating their body temperature). That is, unless they get eaten first by raccoons. Or Oliver.

The painted turtle dragged herself deliberately up the slope from the swamp, across the grass to the base of an overgrown hill that rises in front of the cabin. When we found her she had already begun to dig, gouging the dirt with her scaly back legs. Her claws were sharp as thorns. Not two hands long and vulnerable to any predator, she seemed to paid us no mind. A picture of total focus on the duty at hand.

As we watched, she dropped her eggs into the little hole she had dug, five small white ovals like white jellybeans. Each one she stomped down into the ground with one foot, then the other, sending it deeper into the earth.

We drove away, someplace to go.

When we returned she had departed. Of a hole there was no sign, dirt now entirely covered it. And over the dirt, over the hole, the painted had spread a perfect camouflaging mat of bits of grass and crumbled leaves.

If you hadn’t witnessed the alabaster eggs pop out from under her shell, you would never believe the turtle had been there at all.

We harvested the old cut lumber from downed trees in the woods around the cabin, some of it pretty gnarly, with weathered a mild description of its condition. A light brown mouse ran out of the hole in one! Leaving its little pink babies? Who knows. These chunks of stumps made the fence around my new vegetable garden, and somehow with the dark topsoil leveled within the palisade the effect is very Hobbit-like. Now on to the tomato starts, and perhaps some morning glory vines threaded around the outside of the chunky, earthy fence. But first a bit of fertilizer, maybe the kind I saw at the garden store made of lobster shells?

I’ve got a month until The Orphanmaster debuts… thus a lot of time on my hands. Yes, I have a few events for Love, Fiercely. But for the most part this is a waiting game, watching my tour dance card fill up and crossing my fingers that readers will like the book.

Hence the pyramidal pile of topsoil lying beside the driveway in a carved out section of marsh. Waiting to be raked level, watered, planted with tomatoes, beans, cukes. A vegetable garden. Just the time filler. Working my muscles, I will forget the workings of my mind.

Planted the windowboxes today. Pansies. I don’t know how long it will take them to wither in this heat. It’s impossible to say whether we should luxuriate in the sun or run from the weather in terror.