City snake, country snake
Our little girls are pretty much “townies”, then; Ada and Iris are squeamish yet when it comes to bugs and worms, and they don’t get into the woods as often as we’d like.
Bald-faced hornet
On the other hand, they’ve figured out how to work Annie the baker for cookies, Dieter the brewer for root beer, and they learned way early how to stay clear of moving vehicles.
They met their first black (rat) snake not long ago — Ada is seven and Iris, three — on the same day they were cold-busted poaching tadpoles in the memorial garden of the episcopal church next door.
Our friends Joyce and Allen own the bookstore across the street, and they live an opposite life. They have 90-acres in the still-relatively-remote Canada community, with a little farm and some livestock. They’ve been there for four decades. And their recent blacksnake story, while short on episcopalians, had a bunch of extra snakes.
It seems Allen went out to his shed the other Sunday on an errand and he discovered, in a surplus roll of nylon netting they use to keep birds out of the blueberries, a couple of entangled blacksnakes.
As he went to reposition the netting in order to cast out the serpents, Allen disturbed an unknown nest of bald-faced hornets – which aren’t actually hornets but rather wasps of the yellow jacket family – and they lit him up three or four times as he beat his retreat.
When I was a kid we called bald faced hornets “japanese hornets” and once, Kenny Burns, who later played baseball for the Memphis Tigers, chased a screaming line-drive down the hill and into the woods, where he found a perfectly round hole through the middle of a very large nest of the creatures and came screaming back out, himself. It’s a wonder it didn’t put him off baseball.
Anyway, after the stings, Allen regrouped and freed the snakes. Later, though, on a different errand, he found that the first two snakes had been replaced by five more, in the same netting.
Blacksnakes, as we all know, are pretty good to have around. They keep away poisonous snakes, and eat rodents. On the other hand, they get pretty big – some as long as six feet – and so they’re not always the most fun to hold. That’s what Joyce and Allen did that night, Joyce meticulously clipping glossy black netting away from glossy black snake, in the dark, while Allen seized each in turn by the neck, and it wrapped itself around whatever part of him that was available. The work went well into the wee hours, so Joyce was a little groggy in the retelling the next day.
We’re sure they were looking for some good sleep the next night, but it turns out they were awakened by their sheep-guarding donkey, Doyle, well before dawn, telling them in his own way that there was a raccoon in amongst the chickens.
Tags: bald faced hornet, black rat snake, blueberries, Canada, canada community, Sylva, yellow jacket
Related posts:
