Grateful for Garters
My encounters with wildlife on the home front aren’t always as pleasant as my experiences in the actual “wild”. I haven’t bothered to photograph the chipmunks that attempted to burrow under the back of my house. Or the bat that once swooped through my two-story great room (it’s hard to get a good focus while you’re screaming and crawling to the nearest exit). The birds that occasionally smack into my office window make my heart drop. I’m still not sure what’s distracting these poor birds -there’s no real reflection issue that I can detect. I fear it’s yet another misuse of cell phone texting (friends have suggested the unfortunate birds were “tweeting”).
I was happily surprised the other day to look out this same window of death and find a family of snakes contentedly sunning themselves (through some heavy Ohio-ish cloud cover). They are ordinary garter snakes, now identified as sources of the rustling I hear whenever I weed that particular garden bed. The four of them lingered long enough for my kids to be thrilled and/or repulsed after school and for me to get a few photos…
