How dry is it?

The drought – one of the worst ever – is on everyone’s mind this summer.

How dry is it?

It’s so dry that turtles are trying to drink from the bird bath.

No, really. Dave was cleaning out the fountain just off the deck where our birds keep up a steady round of bathing and drinking, when he noticed a box turtle approaching through the leaves.

We’ve had snapping turtles shuffle up into our yard to lay eggs, but very rarely see box turtles, those bright yellow-checkered brown fellows with the high boxy shell. The little fellow kept coming until he reached Dave’s feet, his head stretching up toward the water. As a joke, Dave sprayed water on him – and don’t you know, the turtle lowered his head and lapped water from the cupped leaves that surrounded him.

That’s when Dave realized this was no chance encounter. The turtle was thirsty, apparently heard the splashing of water, and headed for it – only to discover that it was utterly out of his reach in a bowl 18 inches above the ground. Dave lavished water into the leaves around his little guest, watched him drink, then went on refilling the fountain and the bird bath. When he finished, he looked for the turtle. It was gone. We haven’t seen him again.

We’re delighted to feed and water the wild critters that visit our woodsy lot, but we are often puzzled that they come up a long hill to find us when there are three ponds full of water at the foot of the hill. Too exposed, we suspect; our feeding and watering stations are fairly well hidden by the trees.

We were just going to bed a week or so ago, when I heard a very heavy thud followed by a loud huffing sort of sound, then shuffling in the leaves. Light from the porch light didn’t reveal anything and I felt uneasy about going out (Where’s Dave when I need him? In the shower, never heard a thing.)

I described to him what I’d heard and he (just like a man) brushed it off. He was less cavalier in the morning when we discovered the bowl part of the fountain tipped over to the ground, the concrete frog spitting air, and the pump motor grinding away dry. He unplugged the pump, picked up the stones that the birds light on when they come in for their baths – but it took both of us to wrestle the bowl back up on the pedestal where it belongs.

What knocked it down? To pull that bowl over, a critter had to be large and heavy, or very strong. The heaviest night-roaming animal I know of here is probably the raccoon, but a ’coon would not be heavy enough to tip that fountain. That leaves – what? Squirrels are too light, and diurnal. ’Possums are too light, and so are armadillos.

Armadillos, here? You bet. Dave saw one at one end of the house last week, and watched it frantically try to hide behind the trash cans. It looked so scared, he said. It obviously didn’t know it was facing the world’s kindest animal-lover.

I was privileged recently to have a close encounter with one of our dear planet’s most exquisite creatures. I was tending to the plants on the deck when I heard a thud just inches from my hands. This was a tiny, soft thud, like something that weighed an ounce or so, dropping from an overhanging tree limb. Not like the thing that went thud in the night. That had to weigh at least 60 pounds.

I looked among the plants and discovered what had dropped in. Already climbing up the side of a pot was a pure white fuzzy caterpillar. He (she?) had legs and antenna already unfolded and apparently functional, all a deep magenta.

It’s hard to explain what happened next, how that fat white creature metamorphosed as it did. Nothing seemed to move – yet suddenly a pair of wings parted to show its back, then other structures, and pale green began to replace white.

The wings looked like soft thick bundles with shriveled orange tabs at the bottom, when they unfolded. They became transparent, and the once wrinkled tabs smoothed out like trailing… what? They looked more like feet than anything else, but feet don’t grow on wings.

Each wing was delicately veined, shaded in yellow, the leading edge now lined in deep purple. From nowhere, a pair of fuzzy orange antennae appeared to taste the air. When the wings moved from a position like praying hands, they flattened into a 4-inch wide stealth fighter.

It was a luna moth. I had been watching the transformation from caterpillar to exquisite moth, yes, like the one in the commercial. I’ve seen them before, although infrequently, and never while performing their miraculous metamorphosis.

It was getting dark, and I had a meeting. I left the moth reluctantly, wondering how something could change so before my eyes without apparently moving. How could a chubby white chenille worm become the most graceful of silent fliers with no parent to teach it?

When I got home, he was gone and it was dark, of course, and nothing else was going thud in the night.