Landed in Oregon XI

September 10, 2007

Annie, our lop eared dwarf rabbit, does not have good close-up vision. If you throw a crumb of bread near her, she uses smell and then the touch of her whiskers to find it. She reacts to sound and rapid movement, by going on alert and maybe running. But in the morning she will come to the edge of her cage and having heard us stir will watch at our kitchen window to see us, a distance of forty feet. She will closely watch Manners and Capper, our Manx’s, at an even greater distance. She is alert and may even run to one of her burrows. Yet, when they are near -- right outside her cage or say, within five feet -- she is not alert and may come to the edge of her cage as if she wants to touch noses with them. Maybe she recognizes them. On the other hand, the cats perceive her approach as bold and they put themselves in a ready to flee stance.

Her senses kind of overlap in purpose and help to refine her perception. I guess ours do too. There was a time when I think we had better instruction on smell: This means coyote and this means buffalo and this means wolf and this means fear and this means in heat and this means contentment. Smell is kind of subjective and scientists in their disregard of subjectivity have undermined the old lessons. Humans have become more reliant on their vision. Vision is where you say, By their fruits you shall know them. There was a time when one could smell treachery. Rote instruction is: You shall know them by hearing them. Rote, or hearing, might be better than smelling them but is not as objective as seeing. But seeing, as more strongly with the others, can also be a matter of seeing not what is there but what one wants to see.

Each sense is kind of its own world, reality. A book yet to be written is, War of the Senses. The perception a human has -- as other critters -- is a irregular composite, a synergy, of their senses. Thank you, Annie, for reminding me. Cappy, too.

9/11/07

Planted two coast redwoods and a cedar below the washout. Soon Cappy and Manny showed up. Surely you have noticed that running water sometimes gives persons the urge to pee. Cats don’t have that problem. Instead: digging in sand gives cats the uncontrollable urge to dig in sand and pee or poop as it strikes them. Cats also cover up their holes. I dug a hole and filled the bottom with moss, twigs, leaves and other such debris. I placed the tree in the hole and holding it with one hand I started scraping sand into the hole. Cappy watched, understood, and came over and started covering up the hole.

I noticed yesterday that Annie is getting fat or getting fur or both.

9/12/07

The geese are jogging this week. Sometimes they are up before the sun. You can hear them. These are exercises for the kids, endurance and flight formation, and limbering up the old folks.

9/15/07

Something going on with Brat. Very vocal.

We are slipping into Indian Summer. Cooler. Sunny. Shorter days.

Bees and the hummingbird feeder. In the July heat, the bees discover the feeder. As it cools some leave and a few stay on, having discovered a good thing. The ones that stay on are fewer but more ornery. They fight other bees (of their own kind) and they even keep off hummingbirds. Well, in the Spring, tom turkeys sometimes discover a clean chrome bumper, see their reflection and fluff, display, and peck the bumper. Sometimes on our deck, the same thing occurs when they see their reflection in the sliding glass doors. Well, these bees see their reflection in the windows near the feeder and they fly forcefully into the window and again and then again. Kind of like an insect replica of a couple of billy goats -- ‘cept one goat is a reflection. They really bang into the window. I have never seen one bang hard enough to drop to the ground, but hard enough to wobble a little. A dizzy bee?

9/17/07

Manners and Cappy are shut in to the Sun Room overnight. On a table, I put a hard cat food feeder and two saucers of soft. They are secure there. They are also not running through the house knocking things over. So, last night I forgot the hard cat food. It is a feeder, when full maybe good for a week. They always nibble a bit of hard food. This morning the saucers were licked clean. And on the table was the bottom half of a half eaten mouse. You don’t suppose they were trying to tell me something?