Wildlife

 Today I saw a woodpecker and its baby, while standing in the Elks field talking on the phone. The mother and baby exchanged food mouth to mouth. They both had a red tuft of hair in their head. In Bushmann Park we counted eighteen turtles in the water. They gobbled up dry cat food (don’t use wet. It sinks). “Feeding twenty cats, eighteen turtles…and a partridge in a pear tree,” John said. We used to feed a colony of cats several streets behind the Dollar General. “Old Faithful” was one of the regulars. He had a bad eye. We grew attached to an orange kitten. Mostly they got dry food, but often we brought turkey or tuna or salmon or all of the above (one time a guy on a bike rode by and called us “cat assholes”). 

My neighbor Jim puts his leftovers on a tree stump for squirrels and raccoons. But the park just issued a notice not to feed stray animals. Don’t they realize we’ve got a multitude of stray cats and anybody is feeding somebody something? Exactly. John used to feed mullet to Edgar the Egret, but he stopped coming around (he thinks the hurricane got him). We have left cat food out for possums. And our newest, youngest cats - Blackie and Earl Grey- were lured in by food we used to catch them as kittens. They love their new home. They are free to go out our open kitchen window (makes it hard to air condition) and roam the park, but they stay close to home. They have killed three baby birds and several lizards (my old cat Smokey used to kill squirrels). Anyways, I think they are happiest when they are allowed to roam free (God forbid they get hit by a car ( it has happened and we had to bottle feed three orphaned baby kittens. Only one survived, a calico we named Bear. Haven’t seen her lately)).

Speaking of, we have four cats: Blackie, Earl Grey, Mom, and Little One. Little One lives in the woods and comes in every now and then to eat. Mom is fixed; her last litter was eight kittens (seven black and one calico (all have disappeared due to suspicious cat traps in the trailer park)). We love our animals and feed them well; they get their own rotisserie chickens from BJs ( you can’t beat a $5 chicken). I enjoy their company, and all the wildlife Florida provides. Granted it’s not a snake.