indiana-animalia

We pulled up in the evening, and opened our car door to a rousing chorus of cicadas and crickets. A small toad hopped across the rocky driveway. Zack caught it and showed it to the boys; it hopped wildly around the car a bit before we could catch it and let it go back out. The next morning, we drank coffee in the backyard, where countless bees and flies buzzed around our legs and flowers, along with flitting moths and birds. The impersonators are the hummingbirds, who make sonorous bug-like dives behind your head. Sammy, the family golden retriever, is a kid favorite, of course, and becomes a pillow or a running partner on command. The stray cat is a favorite, too, though not of the grandparents, who are trying to avoid taking in these sorts. And then there's the lithe little lizard with a slinky blue tail that runs round the deck and front porch, the catfish that Zack caught and let go on a night-time fishing trip, the five-inch long praying mantis in the backyard tent, and the fat cicada crawling up a brick wall with dirt still crusted on its back after being born out of the earth (when it falls back into the plants, we find it again by watching where the leaves are twitching the most urgently). I tell you, we spend our time in the city visiting aquariums and zoos to get close to animals, and Puget Sound's shore is an ecology that is more new to me, but being back in the country in the midwest reminds me how much wildlife is present in the day-to-day here. Of course, we've had our raccoons and squirrels quite close to home, as you know if you've read this blog for a while, but it is a very different experience to have to stop your car in order to move a turtle out of the road. When you get out of the car, the air is thick with the smell of cows in a muddy little valley, and you swat a mosquito that lands on your neck.