Showing posts with label wildlife. Show all posts
Showing posts with label wildlife. Show all posts

Thursday, May 02, 2019

They get pretty brazen once the holidays are done


Look out the window. See turkeys.

Apparently, that's just how we roll in our neighborhood here in Omaha, by God, Nebraska.

Friday, June 13, 2014

Because bird brain


Who's afraid of the phony owl?
Phony owl?
Phony owl?
Who's afraid of the phony owl?
Tra la la la la.

Honk if you love the water


If it's June in Omaha, you'll find Canada geese nearly anyplace it's wet.

In this case, that would be the Little Papillion Creek along the Keystone Trail, where this caught my eye on my daily walk. It looks like the waterfowl are having themselves a little community swim.

I'll honk to that. Or they will. Somebody.

Monday, November 26, 2012

Favog of Omaha's Wild Kingdom


Call me Marlin Perkins.

Minutes ago -- and without Jim Fowler to do all the dirty work for me -- I just lovingly removed a red-bellied woodpecker from our basement family room. It was roosting on the carpet in a corner of the room, settled in for the night.

It had to have flown down the flue, as opposed to flew down the flown, and then pushed the iron door at the bottom open. Lucky for it it did; I've found a mummified bird in there before, and a live one or two over the years as well.

This, however, was the first woodpecker who decided to squat in the basement.


When I let it out the back door, it perched on my hand for a while like it was thinking about whether it really wanted to leave. Then it flew off.

Good choice. We have Molly the Dog and her house guest, Boo, who might have seen the woodpecker more as lunch than as fodder for a blog post.

Is what I'm saying.

Saturday, June 12, 2010

The Marlin Perkins Report


And I'll stay here, on the news set, while Jim goes around back to flush out the man-eating raccoon.

Welcome to the morning news in Michigan.

Sweet Jesus! What have we Nebraskans gotten ourselves into with all this Big Ten stuff?

On the other hand, if Michigan coons made the road trip down to Lincoln, then got loose in the studio for the
Husker Baseball TV Show, it would be more excitement than Mike Anderson's squad has generated in the last two seasons.

Oh, mother of Mary!

Thursday, June 10, 2010

Natural selection 1, snake owner 0


Draping a 9-foot python around your neck? What could go wrong?

Strangulation, for one thing. No doubt, this poor Papillion, Neb., fool's last words were "Hey, y'all! Watch this!"


PRAISE GOD the snake-squeezed corpse here didn't belong to the little neighbor girl Cory Byrne let play with his python . . . and put around her neck, as recounted by the Omaha World-Herald:
He placed it on the trampoline outside. He let the children play with it.

“My daughter actually had it around her neck,” said David Driggers, 44, the neighbor. “There were about five or six kids over here that day.”

Things went terribly wrong Wednesday when Byrne, 34, tried to show off the python to a friend.

He was critically injured when the snake, estimated by authorities to be 9 feet long, wrapped around his neck and began strangling him.

Byrne died later at Midlands Community Hospital.

A friend tried to pull the reptile loose. Police arrived, finding Byrne unconscious and without a pulse. They managed to pry the python off Byrne.

“It took all they could do to get it back in the cage,” said Lt. Chris Whitted of the Papillion Police Department.
UNFORTUNATELY, congratulations are not in order for Mr. Byrne as a possible Darwin Award winner, being that you win one by "naturally selecting" yourself out of the gene pool.

On the other hand, we can all look at it this way: He may have accidentally sacrificed his life so the neighborhood kids might keep theirs.


That's not nothing.

God help me, I know it sounds cruel -- and maybe it is -- but it's true. Somebody usually ends up paying for that level of stupidity and irresponsibility, and thank God it wasn't an innocent child.