Wednesday, February 13, 2002
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Wednesday, February 13, 2002 |
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Fish tales and other loose ends By
SALLIE SATTERTHWAITE Given my propensity for inflicting bodily harm on computers dropping a laptop on the kitchen tile, spilling coffee into its keyboard you've got to wonder why I'd keep a fish bowl on my work table. A saltwater tank, at that. It's beautiful. The water stays crystal clear with no effort on my part. Bright coral forms an environment for fish swimming gracefully around and through it, while a ribbon of bubbles gurgles merrily from the sandy bottom. The amazing part is that I've never cleaned the tank, and if I forget to feed its inhabitants, they won't suffer for it. Even the light changes, going from daytime to evening, darkening dramatically, the fish mere silhouettes. At night an artificial light throws a rippling pattern on the sand as the light streams down through the water. The aquarium, you might have guessed, is "in" my computer's monitor, a screensaver offered at SereneScreen.com and bundled with Windows XP by Microsoft? (See it also on FeldonCentral.com/Sachs/thefish.html, a stunning Web site on saltwater tropicals. Alive and real and requiring expert care the darn things fetch as much as $55 apiece.) There are only three virtual fish in my computer, however: a wimplefish, a clown trigger and a powder blue tang. I was wondering where one could buy more fish, some snails and plants, perhaps, maybe a starfish or seahorses. From Bill Gates' Fish Store, no doubt. Knowing Microsoft, should I be surprised to come into my office one morning and find a fish floating belly-up on the surface of my monitor? Or worse yet flopping on my keyboard, dripping water into its expensive innards?
The array of birdfeeders on and beyond our deck does a great job attracting birds, but where birds dine, so do squirrels. Although we thwart their most larcenous sorties with pole baffles, we don't mind too much that they eat the cracked corn we put down for ground feeders. It's 'way cheaper than sunflower seed and helps dampen their appetite for Niger. Over the past few years, however, we have observed some truly odd things (hence the term "squirrelly") happening about 20 feet from the deck. At the edge of the woods in which we live, we placed a rickety old wooden bench we hated to throw away. Birds sometimes land there, and a chipmunk's tunnel opens under it. Clever, don't you think, for that little fellow to have a roof over his front door? "Look at that," Dave exclaimed one morning at breakfast. A squirrel leaped up on the bench and did a somersault in mid-leap, then scurried to the base of a small tree, where he flipped over several times before dashing back to the tree nearest the bench. "What do you suppose ?" I wondered aloud. We watched for many minutes as the furry critter ran back and forth, sometimes soaring onto the bench, other times writhing on his back in the leaves, then leaping straight-legged into the air. He spun like a ball on the ground, ran up a tree and down again, gripped a sapling with his front paws and swung around and around it. Cautiously, we stepped outside to get a closer look. If the squirrel were rabid, chances are he would show no fear or even become aggressive, so we were reassured when he simply ran away in a perfectly normal manner. Had that been the only such exhibition, it would have been strange enough, but we've seen it again and again, at least weekly. And although it's usually a solo performance, sometimes two or three squirrels go into these frenzies together, in a dance choreographed by a lunatic. It's always in the same narrow triangle formed by the bench, a large oak, and an old dead dogwood we left standing for the woodpeckers. When the dogwood rotted and fell, the mad acrobats substituted a sapling nearby. From one point of the triangle to another they go, and close scrutiny of the ground has offered no clue. My hunch: The rotting leaves produce a hallucinogen that intoxicates our visitors although if that's true, why in just that one spot, year after year? Any theories will be gratefully considered. But if we catch anyone out there rolling in the leaves, we're calling the police.
My friend Bill Grabill, a faithful federal public servant who manages wildlife refuges, sent me this, and I've been saving it for you. I had e-mailed him with a question about ducks and waterfowl on Clarks Hill Reservoir last spring, and when he wrote me back, he added a story that he purports came from the files of his agency: "According to the Knight-Ridder News Service, the inscription on the metal bands used by the U.S. Department of the Interior to tag migratory birds has been changed. The bands used to bear the address of the Washington Biological Survey, abbreviated 'Wash. Biol. Surv.' until the agency received the following letter from an Arkansas camper: 'Dear Sirs: While camping last week I shot one of your birds. I think it was a crow. I followed the cooking instructions on the leg tag and I want to tell you, it was horrible.' "The bands are now marked Fish and Wildlife Service."
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