I wrote my thesis, largely at night, right next to a massive star jasmine bush. Often, I’d hear this fairly loud high pitched noise going by at a surprisingly high speed. With the Doppler shift you'd think it was a tiny jet aircraft. I never saw the offending critter at night, and decided it must be a bat picking off the bugs that were attracted to the light of my computer. One Saturday I was facing a deadline, so I took the day off from experiments to write in my usual place. By daylight, I finally saw the little guy making the noise, and found out that a pair of hummingbirds had made a nest in my star jasmine. The noise I'd been hearing was me being "dive-bombed" by daddy hummingbird to get me to go away from his lady and babies! I couldn't really change my routine mid-thesis, but it made me feel pretty badly until I realized they had gotten enough used to my presence to teach their little babies to fly and get honeysuckle nectar from the bush across from the jasmine. Right in front of me! That was pretty memorable.
Not as memorable as finding out that the roar I had thought probably belonged to the local rural-Martinez mountain lion actually belonged to a raccoon the size of a German Shepherd (okay, maybe she wasn't that big, but don't let the truth get in the way of a good story). I happened to wind up between her and her babies because they were cavorting around and ended up on the roof of the toolshed in front of me with Mama behind me. She was making the kind of noise the monkey in me did NOT want to hear from so close in the dark. When I (like a slow-motion take in a horror movie) turned my head to look behind me, expecting to see the mountain lion, Mama was reared up on her hind legs and nearly as tall as me. I did a quick trade study between halting thesis writing for the night and starting a fight with Mama raccoon. I don't think I've ever run so fast in my life.
No comments:
Post a Comment